A Question of Character
Over the weekend I was reading through some fiction-writing advice articles here and there. I don’t think there’s a correct way to write fiction, so long as the author shows authenticity in the finished work. Pants or plan, write in order or out of sequence, finish in a day or a year. Whatever works for you.
One thing that I find works for many people is coming up with characters first, and sketching them out, so as to build stories around them. It occurred to me recently that I almost never do this, and I wondered why.
There may be some deeply hidden psychological reason for it, or it may be like my preference for tea over coffee, that is to say, it just is. Either way it’s not a conscious decision on my part.
I almost always start with a story or concept. A turn of events that I find interesting. More a plotter than a pantser, I’ll proceed to outline what happens, introducing characters to myself by naming them in said outline. My characters form somewhat after the fact, though. The type of people that would be most interesting to observe experiencing the concept or event that came to me in my initial brainstorm. My characters sort of emerge from the events I’ve decided to describe.
A distant second in terms of frequency of starting points for my fiction is setting. I’ll think a certain place or time, or even mood would make for a good piece of fiction. If it works, the events within that world show up, followed once again by the characters.
All by way of saying that characters almost never come to me first when writing. It’s also rare that a character steps out of my imagination independent of a story. I have no real characters in search of a plot within my notebooks or my mind. Even those that are the most faintly drawn for possible future projects are already attached to a story in the broadest sense. (Though I have a few barren story landscapes not yet populated with characters.)
When characters do present themselves to me at any point in the process, I almost never create character sketches. I hear fellow authors mention the invaluable nature of this tactic. “You have to know your character inside and out in order to know how to write their reactions to things.” Well, what can I say? I don’t.
Not that I eschew that method. As I said already, whatever works for any given author. Yet a preponderance of the evidence suggests to me so far that more authors among those who plan start with characters, and in many cases, detailed descriptions of same even before the author knows where said characters will appear.
Why is this so rarely the case for me, I wonder. Is it because my actual perceptions of the real world tend to start with circumstances as opposed to people? Is my natural reluctance to talk about myself with most people somehow connected to my reluctance to delve into every minute detail of a character I’m creating for a story? I’ve even thought that some of it has to do with respect for privacy, if you can believe that. I tend to relate to real people without prying into the details of their life right away, preferring to let them share what they think ought to be shared at any given time. Maybe I am the same with my very own characters…preferring to let them reveal aspects of themselves in an organic fashion even to me. I will steer things, as the author, when needed, but not as often as you may think.
It may even have to do with the relationship I have with my characters. There are always exceptions, and anything is possible in the future, but I tend to have a business-like relationship with my characters. In most cases I respect them, appreciate them, even feel thankful to some of them. Yet I don’t feel obsessed with them, nor do I feel them constantly begging and pleading for attention. I show up for work on a story when it’s time, and so do they, usually. We seem to respect one another’s “time,” if I may get all meta on your for a moment.
The more I think about both this relationship I have and this process I undertake in pursuit of characters in my fiction, the more odd it seems. As a reader, I love character most, I think. I can hold on with a mediocre work longer if I like the characters. Yet if I don’t like spending time with the people in a novel, even the “villains”, I’m far less forgiving of plot holes and turgid writing. So one would think characters would be the center of my writing experience from the beginning, instead of (hopefully) becoming so by the end.
I will say that in the single stage play I’ve written, characters were more in the forefront from the start than plot, but that may not count. Character is everything in the theatre. Real breathing people have to present characters on the stage, as opposed to in fiction where characters exist in one’s mind only.
Writing has gone a bit slow for me of late, what with the former Novel 2 now on ice. Perhaps I’ll experiment with “character first” writing- come up with a few characters that have no home, just for the sake of doing so. For the exercise, if nothing else. Then I can see if they will open up an idea for a whole story or novel once they exist more fully. It never hurts to experiment.
What about you writers out there…which aspects of a fiction do you tend to explore first? Character? Setting? Plot? Something else?
An Overview of My Novel
The plan, as I have mentioned before, is to publish my community theatre novel, Flowers of Dionysus in June. I completed final edits earlier this year, and I will begin the scary, techie aspects of formatting and such for publication within the week. So as I begin that process, I want to say a few words about the novel. I hope to share a little bit about it here on the blog periodically between now and the launch.
Flowers of Dionysus is a fantasy novel, by most definitions, though to be honest I’d rather say it’s a novel with “fantasy elements.” But I don’t know if you’re allowed to do that, so I’ll play it safe under the umbrella of “fantasy.”
But there are no wizards and orcs in this story. Set in the present day, its about a small, somewhat troubled community playhouse trying to stage its annual summer show. Staff changes, lazy actors and power-hungry bureaucrats are but a few of the obstacles the production faces. In the center of it all, whether he likes it or not, is Matthias (Matt) Blackwell. Matt’s a weary, somewhat cynical guy who has given up acting only to be sucked into this production as a favor to a longtime friend. Though he is the main protagonist, the novel shares third-person points of view with four other characters, each with their own challenges and insecurities, as the story unfolds.
Theatre geeks out there will recognize both the mundane and the mad aspects of putting on an all-volunteer show. Yet strange things beyond theatre eccentricities begin to happen in and around the Little Dionysus Playhouse. (The same setting as my short story compilation, Thank You For Ten.) Chance encounters, mysterious strangers, possible hallucinations. Is there a point to any of it? Is everyone aware that it’s going on? And most importantly, will the play still go up as planned?
This is my novel, and I’ll be introducing you to some more of the characters and other aspects as time goes on leading up to the launch.
Correction: I missed a mistake when I first published this post. I referred to the novel as first-person. It is in fact third-person.
Meanderings: Cornfields.
The fields adjacent to my house are farmed by their owner each year. The crops are rotated annually, of course, and about every three or four years, corn takes its turn, much to my chagrin.
It’s not unpleasant at first. The green, leafy sprouts of young corn are, if not picturesque at least possessive of an acceptable color palate. This continues for a few months, if the corn is healthy. “Knee high by the Fourth of July” as the old saying goes. The corn around here usually attains that height and then some. Because the fields run right up to my quarter-of-a-mile long driveway, at their peak height the corn stalks give the illusion of a half-pipe. From the car, you can see nothing but the corn the ground and the sky.
Sound, other than animals and/or wind rustling the corn itself, is diminished by the thickness of this feed-plant-in-progress. On especially hot summer days, (of which there are plenty in Maryland) the aroma of raw corn is baked into the atmosphere around my house.
For those three weeks or so at the apex of corn growth, the undulating, viridescent stalks smack of innocent, apolitical Americana. An amber wave of grain my be more poetic in its patriotism, but rows of corn bring to mind the agricultural vertebrae of this nation just as much on sight, if you’re in the correct mood.
Until, that is, the first inches of browning invade the tips of the leaves. This color will dominate the landscape around my home, in one form or another, for months afterward.
Over the first few weeks of autumn this brown lifelessness spreads through every part of every leaf, stalk and husk all throughout the field, until late September or early October welcomes a rigid yet rickety army of dried up future-feed.
The now chilly winds that blow through the seemingly forgotten crop no longer cause a gentle, caressing rustle to be heard. Rather a crackling rattle greets anyone with business nearby outside in the final weeks before the harvest. Gone is the sense of an innocuous half-pipe in my driveway, replaced by the sense of frustrated ghosts surrounding my car as they moan in lament of their existence.
Days lead into weeks of this ugliness, and just as I feel like I can stand the appearance of this deteriorating abomination no more, I wake to find the farmer’s machinery at work, harvesting the cobs from the stalks.
But please don’t think that’s the end of it, or even the beginning of the end of it. For even once the days-long harvest is complete, and the noisy machinery drives off to wherever the corn is to be stored, there is the devastation it leaves behind on the land surrounding my house.
Jagged, broken stalks just anywhere from a few inches to two feet into the air, pointing in various directions. Stray chunks of cob and listless husks litter the driveway, and when the wind is right, the yard. The impression of a bombed-out city stretches across much of my view from either side of my house. Although perhaps a battle would leave a more even, restful pattern on the corn. I remember reading the words of Civil War General Joseph Hooker, who wrote of the cornfield at Antietam after the battle:
“Every stalk of corn in the northern and greater part of the field was cut as closely as could have been done by a knife…”
Remove from that scene, if you can, the human death and suffering, and warfare seems to have had almost a surgical effect on the corn itself, so neat and clean were the stubs to which the stalks were reduced. There is nothing surgical about an actual corn harvest. Rather it attacks the corn, chops, thrusts, shoots and plows its way into the crop, leaving behind a pitiful testimonial to what had once grown and dried up in these fields.
Nor does the ragged look of a corn crop post-harvest depart in a day or two. If anything, as fall fades into winter, and more stalks are broken by wind and ice and snow and the mud rising up in cold slop around it, the field presents a vista even more pitiable.
One cannot run or even walk through such fields carelessly, as the threat of tripping over stalks, or even being scratched by the same is ever-present. A mere dusting of snow provides no relief to the scene, the taller stalks piercing up out of the snow, their brown-yellow by no means a complement to the virgin white. Covering any trace of the corn harvest would require a snow deep enough to be depressing in its own right. Parents in all likelihood would still refrain from letting their children sled on such hill, for fear of thousands of buried, hardened sticks that have the benefit of tenacious roots keeping them in place.
It’s well that the prodigious deer and wild turkey population in this area find so much sustenance from such fields during the winter, otherwise the entire depressing scene would provide me with almost nothing to celebrate.
Soy. Winter wheat. The occasional type of bean I’ve not bothered to identify. All of these crops, in their turn, fill the nearby field with color, don’t obstruct the view, and have the courtesy to vanish almost totally when harvested, leaving behind simply an empty field. Though neither a purveyor nor a consumer of any of these products, I look forward to their arrival later this year, for it will mark, at last, an end to the remains of animal corn that I’ve lived with for the last few weeks. I can then put it out of my mind.
At least for the next few years.
“Birth” of a Story
Today is my birthday. (Thanks. No need to send anything.) It got me thinking about birth of a different kind though.
When is a fiction idea “born? Our stories start somewhere, but is there a definitive moment of their birth for the writer?
Is our story born the moment the first flash of an idea enters our mind? Obviously this is the first transcendence of ordinary thinking necessary for all stories, even if they are reboots of something else; that seed must be planted in our minds.
Yet not all seeds take root. I myself have shelved my most recent attempt at a novel. I may come back to it someday of course, but right now it’s in limbo. There are plenty of ideas for stories of mine that I will almost certainly not go back to, however. Was the story still “born” even though it will never truly exist?
Perhaps completing a first draft represents the so-called birth of a story. First drafts mean different things to different people, of course. Some embrace the “shitty first draft” while others correct it as they go along. In either case, perhaps this is when an idea is born in earnest. That is, after all, the first fully formed version of said story, even if heavy edits follow.
Then again, if you edit something severely, is it the same story, or has it become something else? If you see it as an evolving entity, like a person, than the story’s birthday may indeed be the day you finish that first draft. But if subsequent edits feel like an entirely different thing you may not consider it a “birth” until you’ve made your own final edits, as I recently did with my first novel.
At this point, I am self-publishing. Maybe a story is born once it’s available to read? Self published, formatted and such. Those who traditionally publish likely consider the “birth” of their project the moment it hits brick and mortar bookstores. On the other side of that coin, is a fully polished, formatted and available book in either publishing world truly “alive” if nobody has ever read it? Perhaps a story is born when a certain number of people have read it.
Or here’s a thought; a story has multiple birthdays. Every time someone reads what we have written, and feels alive, or moved, or thoughtful because of it, a story is born anew. It takes on the life of both we, the authors, and the reader. It seeps into a reader’s own artistic view of the word, the words make up quotations in their conversations, and the characters inspire an action in actual lives. When the countless spinning orbs of a chaotic universe are set on a whole new course by which they shape the orbits of innumerable subsequent objects because of a story we have told to our fellow people.
I can’t speak for anyone but me, but that sounds like a birthday to me.
Introverts Are Not Specimens
I’m the organizer of a local introverts meet up group. Just less than two years ago, I went looking for a local group that catered to introverts and found none, so I started one myself and called it “Social Introverts.” It has by and large been a success. We meet this Saturday, in fact.
I’ve been thinking lately about two “incidents” for lack of a better word that have occurred at our meet ups in the past. One happened a few months ago, and the other about a year ago. Both highlight a potential annoyance that perhaps other introverts have faced. I didn’t write about either incident in detail until quite a bit of time had gone by, just to be sure I wasn’t “shooting from the hip.”
Not that I was angry either time, but as you’ll see I had every right to be at least annoyed, for more than one reason.
The first time, we met at a local cafe in the afternoon. Back then, I didn’t cap the number of attendees as much as I do now, and there happened to be about ten who showed up. (I keep it at seven or less these days. Better for conversation.) We’d all been conversing for maybe half an hour, when a woman approached our table. She asked if we were the meetup group her friend told her about. I told her I wasn’t sure, because I didn’t know what her friend had told her, but that we were the social introverts group. This interloper proceeded to repeat how her friend had mentioned that she should check out this meet up, but never confirmed we were even the one she was looking for. She did, however, want a definition for “introverted.”
Several of us obliged her question, (though part of the point of the group is not to have to explain ourselves to other people who are not introverted.) This woman pulls up a chair and sits down with us, (uninvited) and says, “I suppose then it’s my job to convert all of you to extroverts.”
I believe I said something like, “You’d be wasting your time.” I then tried to explain how one doesn’t just convert to another temperament, but she was already talking about something else.
I sensed that several others at the table, though not as put off by this behavior as I was, nevertheless would have been happy had this visitor never shown up.
I could have sent her away. As organizer of the group, I probably should have. But I wasn’t going to be that guy. I let her stay, and interject things into the conversation(s) we were having. I had a hunch the problem would take care of itself. And it did. After sitting mostly in silence for a few minutes, this conversionist excused herself and left. I never did know if her friend had sent her to us, and she never said who her friend was. I do know I’ve not seen or heard from her since.
Those that were present laugh about it from time to time when we gather at meetings. We share the story with newcomers. It convinced me to keep our meetup locations hidden to non-members from then on out.
Move forward in time to just before Christmas, last year. Same cafe, if you can believe it. A smaller group of introverts this time. After a while a guy in a suit is sort of hovering nearby, but doesn’t say anything. New people come to meetings often, and I don’t always recognize people from their picture, so I think he may be someone who RSVPed. Just as I am about to ask him something, he introduces himself.
“I’m not officially a member of this group,” he says, (as though there were an unofficial way to be a member.) “But I was looking at your meetup page, and after reading some of the comments and doing a little investigating, I determined this had to be where all of you were meeting.”
So much for not revealing where the meetups are to non-members.
This dude told us that he’d hoped to learn more about what it is to be an introvert, and he thought meeting some of us was the best way. After another round of playing, “what exactly is an introvert?” this guest mentioned, “Then I must be an extrovert, as I thought.” More questions about what it’s like to be introverted, and what we do and how we think.
He wasn’t without intelligence, but as you can imagine I wasn’t thrilled with the nature of his visit. And whenever anyone tried to turn the conversation back on him and his career, he had a curious lack of information to share about his own profession. He was, however, on his way to a formal dance that night, about two hours away. This he mentioned more than once.
As he was leaving, I mentioned to him that he could always join the group officially, and not have to sneak around to find out where we are. (Translation: Don’t do that any more, it’s rude.) I also told him he could contact me if he had any further questions. He said he’d have to do that, but I’ve not heard from him since.
That visit inspired me to change the description of the group to be more specific.
I hold no malice toward either of these peaceful invaders. I’m sure neither meant any harm, though both were, in my view, quite presumptuous. There is a reason people have meetup pages, with RSVPs and such. They are in place to control who comes to what. Ignoring that is rude. And while I don’t mind some healthy curiosity about what it means to be an introvert, there are plenty of places to learn about such things online and off line. If someone does want to talk to a person about it, there is a right way and wrong way of doing it. Standing up in the middle of a Catholic Mass to ask questions about the church is not appropriate. Though what we do in my meetup is not a religion, it is a group with a purpose, and we have every right to expect that to be respected.
Though I own the group, I don’t speak on behalf of its members. I don’t know their thoughts on these things. But as for me, both times I felt as though being introverted were something weird, rare, or in need of repair. A curiosity. I felt that the group was being used at both of these times as a case study, more than a social occasion. There is a time and a place for learning, as I said, but introverts are not such an unusual “breed” that people must surround them, like fish in an aquarium to gawk and ponder. We make up about half the population, after all; we’re not that unusual.
Am I overreacting? In some aspects perhaps. Yet not totally. That’s why I waited so long to blog about this, so I wouldn’t appear to be venting as opposed to expressing a concern. My guess is that other introverts have at times felt treated as more of an oddity than a type of personality, and I wanted to express solidarity with such people through this post.
Ty Unglebower 