| I’ve
read quite a few guide books on creative writing, all of which spend considerable
time on character—whether the guide book is an almost-religious
mediation on great writing like John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction
or an asinine paint-by-numbers workbook like (and I’m making this
up, I hope) YOU, TOO, CAN WRITE THIS YEAR’S GREATEST BESTSELLER
EVER IN THREE SHORT WEEKS!!!! One gets all sorts of advice about building
great characters, and, because I’m an insufferable iconoclast, I
question some of what I’ve read, if only a little bit.
My first gripe is with the popular idea that “universal types”
or “archetypes” make the best characters because they are
recognizable and comfortable to a wide variety of readers. Star Wars is
loaded with these archetypes—from Han Solo the wisecracking rogue
mercenary to Luke Skywalker the wide-eyed boy hero to Darth Vader the
ruthless overlord with a dark secret. Crime fiction features plenty of
archetypes, and many of them have been famous serial detectives like Sherlock
Holmes, Mike Hammer, Phillip Marlowe, Sam Spade and so on. I’m not
about to argue against such characters. They are some of the most famous
and lucrative characters in film and novel history. But sometimes I wonder
if maybe this endless recycling of universal types doesn’t lead
to more bad, clichéd, dull, formulaic novels than fresh and exciting
novels.
The fact that a character is often universal seems almost a given. Every
character is universal, in that she exhibits traits we recognize from
ourselves, our friends, or our fantasies about what we could be. Saying
“the key to a great character is universality” is almost akin
to saying “the key to a great character is to ensure she has two
fully functioning eyeballs.” Most competent writers create recognizable
characters rather unconsciously, and any self-conscious effort to do it
seems almost destined for flatness and cliché. I can almost imagine
the hack writer inventing his characters by rolling a twenty-sided die
and filling out one of those old Dungeons & Dragons data charts: agility
15, stamina 7, constitution 12.
By contrast, there is the concept of defamiliarization, which I’m
borrowing from literary theory (the Russian Formalists first, then Charles
Baxter in his brilliant essay on defamiliarization in Burning Down the
House). This idea says that what’s exciting, what’s compelling
about good fiction is how it makes the familiar suddenly strange again,
that it unsettles the reader, thus prompting her to get excited and entranced
by a weird, fresh, exciting new view of the world. When I look at character
this way, I begin to suspect that the most exciting and interesting characters
are exciting and interesting because of the ways that I don’t recognize
them, not the ways I do. Right now I’m finishing a truly defamiliarizing
novel called Smonk by Tom Franklin. Its main character is a one-eyed syphilitic
dwarf with a big goiter. Can’t get much stranger than that, and
as a reader I’m just as much compelled by the strangeness of the
character as I am by the power of the story and the language. Granted,
one needs to be able to pull off such a stunt. Too much rampant strangeness
and the reader no longer feels (that is, emotionally) what’s familiar
behind the unique details; it’s unfamiliar instead of de-familiar.
By the way, this crazy dwarf dude is a womanizing, murdering lowlife that
is deserving of almost none of my sympathy, but I find him compelling
anyway. This fact leads me to question another common “truth”
about great protagonists, which is they have to be likeable. If one wants
nothing but a familiar, comfortable read, then sure—but I’ve
often been thrilled by books brimming with nothing but despicable characters.
My favorite, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, is a prime example. Jim
Thompson’s entire oeuvre is another. Frankenstein? Cormac McCarthy’s
Blood Meridian? James Ellroy’s American Tabloid? These are some
of my favorite books, though I’d never invite a single character
from a single one of them into my home for dinner. We sympathize with
what is familiar, but we are also lured by what is unfamiliar, just as
we are compelled to look at a car wreck on the roadside. To bring my point
back to the case at hand: I think the unnerving, the disturbing, the discomforting,
and the unfamiliar seems so fundamental to noir fiction that it’s
often disheartening to hear folks argue against it.
Here’s the third “rule” I wonder about: a protagonist
must undergo a significant and permanent change by the end of the novel.
This advice has the weight of a commandment, and it’s certainly
true most of the time. After all, the heart of drama is in a character’s
escalating struggle against opposing forces, forcing him or her to change.
I won’t argue, for instance, that I was constantly compelled watching
Billy Costigan (Leo DiCaprio) in The Departed gradually devolve under
the pressure of his undercover operations. And, much like the Grinch,
L.A. Confidential’s Bud White (Russell Crowe) lets his heart grow
a bit by the end of the movie version. The characters in James Ellroy’s
original novel evince less obvious transformations than in the movie version,
and yet the novel is no less compelling.
But outside of the Hollywood system lurks an army of fascinating noir
characters who undergo virtually no change at all. The backward/circular
chronology of Memento (Guy Pearce) demands that Leonard doesn’t
change. “Alice” (Natalie Portman) in Closer is such a mercurial
femme fatale that change in her character is only an illusion. In Brick,
Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is so stoic in the face of his mounting
troubles that we’re forced to paint our own reactions onto his blank
face. The emotionally vacant, blank slate protagonist or femme fatale
is the very basis of hardboiled noir, and the device has been working
for nearly a century. It provides an empty costume that the reader or
viewer can fit his emotions inside. It provides the locked box inside
which the writer hides her secrets, poised to be sprung on the audience.
The audience is the real barometer for change, I think. The characters
are not required to change so much as the audience is required to change—to
grow in understanding as more and more information is revealed. To pull
a simile from a decidedly non-noir source, I’ll say characters are
like flowers—closed bulbs at the beginning; in full, glorious, revelatory
bloom at the end. We appreciate the beauty of the revelation, but the
flower is still the same flower. The Leonard we meet at the beginning/end
of Memento is the same Leonard we see at the end/beginning—but both
Leonard and the viewer are struck by the mind-boggling information he
learns about himself. For an instant, he sees himself in full bloom. An
instant later that Pandora’s box will slam back shut on him, but
not us. Similarly, what is revealed about Alice in Closer does not change
her character. Rather, it revises everything we thought we understood
about her, as if we’ve watched the movie twice.
This talk of change is a great segue into the issue of serial characters—your
Harry Bosch, your John Rain, your John Rebus, your Sherlock Holmes. As
I move from my final revised draft of my first novel (phew!) to brainstorming
my second, this issue is full on my mind. I need to decide whether I want
my police investigator to take another case, and currently I’m leaning
toward leaving her alone and moving on to new characters and fresh locales.
Please don’t get me wrong: I’m not here to disagree with the
hundreds of thousands of thriller readers who have resoundingly approved
the use of serial characters. It certainly makes good business sense to
keep a serial character going, so long as you (the writer) don’t
crash your car in the snow and get rescued by Annie Wilkes.
For the reader and writer both, serial characters provide the comfort
of an old friend. Or at least, they provide us with that old costume we
can dress our emotions inside (thus the reason why so many serial characters
are hardboiled blanks, all of them with anonymous-sounding names like
John). Sitcom characters are similar; I watch Larry David in Curb Your
Enthusiasm not because I expect to be surprised by what he’ll do
or say, but because I enjoy the satisfaction of correctly anticipating
what he’ll do or say in every new situation. I read Michael Connelly’s
Harry Bosch novels for a similar reason. Of course Bosch develops over
the novels—new girlfriends, a kid, old revelations—but these
developments are more like a rearrangement of the furniture than a deep-seeded
transformation. In fact, the conventions of narrative dictate that serial
characters can’t really change that much over the course of a single
novel because dramatically sharp character arcs in sequel after sequel
eventually get a little difficult to believe. Somebody who changes too
much is wishy-washy, the furthest thing from the hardboiled cynic that
so many serial characters embody.
Can I make a potentially disastrous admission? I like Connelly’s
Bosch novels, but in truth I love his stand-alones The Poet and Void Moon
even more (and I particularly love his almost-stand-alone Blood Work).
The protagonists in those three books had more at stake, more to prove,
because they only had one book to do it. I am fully aware that Connelly
reexamined some characters from The Poet in The Narrows, but The Narrows
provides a good illustration of my point. It is, in my humble opinion,
the weakest novel I’ve read of Connelly’s impressive output.
It lacks Jack McEvoy’s compelling voice and his urgent quest to
find his brother’s killer, it reverses the cynical beauty of The
Poet’s ambiguous ending, and it mercilessly kills off a main character
from one of Connelly’s earlier books (it happens in the beginning,
so I’m not giving anything away).
In fact, in my own little world I count Blood Work as a standalone because
I don’t like to think about Terry McCaleb’s subsequent fate
(and I haven’t read A Darkness More than Night). Blood Work is also,
I contend, a standalone because it so beautifully captures the total story
arc of a great protagonist. I can’t imagine where Connelly could
take McCaleb after Blood Work ends. In fact, one of Connelly’s justifications
for killing off McCaleb was the settlement of his character; there was
simply nowhere else to go with him. Would that some other writers (none
of whom I have named here) treat their own serial characters with such
ruthlessness. We’d have a lot fewer flogged horse corpses lying
around.
So back to my own dilemma—serial or no serial? I choose the latter,
no matter the commercial risks. Heck, if readers hate the characters in
Pyres then I won’t have wasted my time writing more nonsense about
them that nobody will want to read. I’m toying with the idea of
letting some characters from my first novel show up as minor players in
some subsequent novels (if I’m lucky enough to write them). Seeing
them mulling around in the background will fulfill my desire for a sense
of “connectivity” in my writing, similar to the way Stephen
King wrote many of his novels toward the “mythology” of his
Dark Tower series without ever recycling the same protagonist, except,
of course, Roland himself. One gets a little tingling thrill when somebody
in a Stephen King novel refers to “that rabid St. Bernard over in
Castle Rock,” or some such reference.
You might detect a contradiction between two ideas about character here—that
they need not change, and that there might be an inherent flaw in the
concept of the recurring character. But there is no contradiction, I believe.
If a novel does its job of fully, deeply revealing the full bloom of a
character to the reader—whether or not that character changes—then
there seems no reason to need to revisit that flower a second time.
Mind you, I fully respect the writer who can pull off a serial character.
She circumvents the problems I mention in ways that I can’t emulate.
But as for my own aesthetic—whatever that means—I’m
too fickle. In order to immerse myself in a character, I have to have
a burning desire to get to know her. The desire has to be total, and it
has to be fulfilled by the end of the story or novel. She has to be so
fully exposed that nothing more could possibly be revealed. I swear these
innuendos only became intentional halfway through the paragraph, but they
leads me to a disturbingly self-revelatory conclusion, which is that I’m
not one to call my characters back for a second date after the initial
one-night stand.
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