When I started writing fiction, I loved creating my minor characters: they were so lively and vivid; they stood out unmistakably.
My main character was a different kettle of fish. Though he walked and talked, performed actions, had motives, and projected a reasonably credible pattern of personal qualities, he wasn’t iconic or compelling to me. I couldn’t quite get my hands around him; and because I couldn’t, nobody else could.
I was putting forward a blob and calling him my protagonist. Who would care about him? A few readers, perhaps, but too few. And even they wouldn’t care enough. I needed the kind of character who could break through the fourth wall, grab you and refused to let you go.
“Give him some not-so-nice qualities,” a friend suggested. Good advice, but when I tried it, my guy became the same blob, only not so nice now.
Talk about writer’s block–at one point I was moments away from packing it in and going back to editing PSA’s for the American Lung Association. Instead, I sat down in the road and refused to budge until I had a breakthrough.
Miraculously, just at that crucial point, the clouds parted–
Just kidding, of course–but only just, since it was at that low point in my writing life that somebody turned me on to Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers.
What happened? Many marvelous story elements emerge effortlessly in the wake of strong characterization, so it would be fair to say my entire ability to write fiction was transformed by the sudden gift of freewriting.
By launching a series of freewrites, I could end up, for the first time, inside my characters–and in fact, my problem all along had been that I didn’t know how to dig in deeply enough: When I thought I was developing a character, I was only developing the outside of a character. I had assumed I was “inside” if I wrote clinical summaries like this: “He is bitter because his father remarried and his stepmother never loved him as much as she loved her own kids, his half-siblings.”
Contrast that with the following:
it makes me sick inside, as if I had eaten dirt, the heaviness the bitterness of god knows what? and it never stops never when I see him even now, years later and the betrayal the betrayal, and I know it’s his life, his life too. It’s not fair to him, but fair or not fair isn’t what makes you sick. the man drove over me with his life. it was an accident. he didn’t mean it. but he killed me. or that version of me. he brought horror into my life in the form of his true love, who ;loved him well gave him children but to me was nothing more tha a witch…she might as well have peeled my skin a little every day. and he made that happen. I love my dad. I will never have my dad. I hate him with a hate the depletes me. I will never be who I might have been, never. the hatred makes me smaller. if I hate the fullest, if I let that be, I might reduce to nothing, I might become a place in the atomosphere where something was supposed to be, but never was.
That’s a freewrite I just did for this post. It’s rough and sloppy because I haven’t corrected it. I haven’t even gone back and reread it, because it’s not writing, it’s thinking. And when I say that, I don’t mean to say it’s a record of a thought proecess, I mean it’s THINKING, literally.
Not only that, but it’s thinking of a kind you almost never do while awake. And trust me, once you’ve lit up that character’s private self, you’ll never again confuse a list of traits or a case history with “inside” character knowledge.
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