Likable Characters

No doubt you’ve met some despicable lunks, in literature as in life. So what’s all the fuss about likable characters?

Let’s assume you love your characters deeply and passionately, even the evil and naughty ones (maybe you love those the most). But what if your readers aren’t as taken by them? While characters must of course be themselves, it’s worth noting the traits that readers seem drawn to. Likable characters tend to be proactive and driven, though we also appreciate passive characters who are given a chance to show their mettle. We like characters that are vulnerable and redeemable. Charm doesn’t hurt.

Our interest in characters builds from the set up. “I remember reading once that if you want readers to bond with your main character, put him in love or in trouble on the first page,” says author Elise Broach. “The reason isn’t hard to fathom: it makes the character vulnerable, and readers are instinctively drawn to, interested in, and protective of vulnerable characters. A difficult situation with a high emotional investment for the character sows the seeds of compassion and affection in the reader.” Broach notes that this one trick of circumstance can compensate for a bunch of off-putting personality traits.

Spunk, courage, persistence, ingenuity, kindness, loyalty – these are among the traits that make a character likable, she points out. Humor can offset a number of vices. We’re also endeared to characters with weaknesses like poor judgment (in moderation), as that helps build suspense.

What don’t readers like in a character? Predictability, self-pity, preachiness, whining – we have a low tolerance for characters that suffer from these flaws. The passive character can be also be tricky, although author Robin Romm points out that some of the best stories have passive protagonists, characters who have not yet acted on their latent desires. A fierce protagonist can alarm or exhaust the reader, Romm notes, and he may not be capable of the same revelations as a passive character.  “The trick is that the passive character doesn’t stay passive,” Romm says. The passive character should be pushed toward moments of complicated crisis that make readers rethink who she is.

Is a likable female character different from a likable male character? Though it’s not especially literary, Shana Mlawski conducted ananalysis of Entertainment Weekly’s 100 Fav Fictional Characters list. Her conclusions: “Most great female characters, the EW list seems to say, are doers—not thinkers or losers or comedians or lovable ogres or what have you.  Great male characters, meanwhile, range across the entirety of human experience.” Perhaps, Mlawski posits, the problem lies with writers who don’t know how to write nuanced female characters, and in particular with male writers who are afraid they’ll be accused of misogyny if they push beyond the safe strong female character mold. “Or is it that Hollywood’s female characters have been focus-grouped to death, as A.O. Scott suggested in his (hilarious) review of Knight and Day?” Mlawski asks. “Are writers shackled by the market research that says that likable female characters must be ‘tough but not aggressive,’ ‘sexy but not actually having sex,’ and ‘willing to fall for a certain kind of guy without entirely losing their heads’?” 

“The perfect hero is the one who offers the most conflict in the situation, has the longest emotional journey, and has a primal goal we can all root for,” notes author Blake Snyder. Though he’s speaking of screenwriting, it doesn’t hurt the literary writer to consider the questions he poses on character:

• Is your hero’s goal clearly stated in the set-up?
• Do clues of what to do next just come to your hero or does she seek them out?
• Is your hero active or passive?
• Do other characters tell your character what to do, or does she tell them?

In the end, all we want is to create characters that readers care about, characters they’ll stick with to the end and continue to think about after they’ve finished reading.

Life into Story

When a certain politician released her autobiography a few years ago, a mock cover circulated: All About Me, by Me, Me, Me. The Seusslike rendering generated laughs because it captured the narcissism of this particular individual - and perhaps of politicians in general.

Laugh as we may, the truth is that nearly everything a writer creates is at some level All About Me. The first rule of writing is to write what you know, and unless we suffer from narcissism or other delusional disorders, what we know best is ourselves. So how does something so personal and seemingly egocentric get spun into writing that’s meaningful, true, and of interest to readers?

Start with your motivation. If you’re bent on showing the world all the ways you’ve been wronged, shut down your laptop and a join a support group. As author Steve Almond points out, writers should at all times love their characters, and that’s tough to do when you’re bent on revenge

Then push beyond what you know. Discover what only you can write, the experiences and perspectives that not everyone has. Go beyond stuff that happened to you and probe the things you got yourself into. So you were raised by a pack of wolves. Readers want to know what happened when you challenged the alpha or failed to howl like the rest. “Good stories show how people survive,” Almond says, adding that a "character in a hole" is only of interest when you probe her unbearable feelings and the thwarted desires.

Should you tell your truth straight or slant? Both, if you’re honest. In nonfiction, there’s always a slant, and that slant will be all about you, the truth that you’ve lived and the truth you’re discovering – and that’s without even venturing onto the slippery slope of remembered or emotional truth. If you write fiction, go ahead and tell yourself you’re making everything up, but the truth that you’ve lived and the truth you’re discovering will creep in regardless.

Still, there’s the question of form. In Turning Life into Fiction, Robin Hemley advises writers to consider how wedded they are to the facts. If you’ve chosen fiction as your form, you mustn't cling to what “really happened.” Memoir, on the other hand, frees you – somewhat – from the expectations of narrative; in memoir, writer David Shields notes, issues of identity take center stage, and revelations can be more episodic than in a novel or short story. At the same time, if allowing artifice or recreated memory into your memoir feels wrong, you’re better off sticking with fiction.  The material is basically immaterial, Hemley says. The most fascinating life events handled badly by the author make for dull reading, while a strong rendering draws interest in what might otherwise seem a dull life.

In both fiction and memoir, strong narrative structure transforms your life, or parts of it, into story. “All of our lives are narrative,” says author Jon Franklin. “Story is something else: taking select parts of a narrative, separating them from everything else, and arranging them so they have meaning.” Follow Chekhov’s advice, Franklin suggests, and look for points of character complication, where characters are forced into action and transformation. You should be able to identify the points of insight, the moments that lead to these transformations. Building on the theories of neuroanatomist Paul MacLean, Franklin contends that every narrative should also work on three levels: what happens on the surface, what happens in the emotional landscape, and the universal, evoked by the narrative rhythms.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that since it’s your story, either you or a character like you must tell it. Decisions on point of view are more complicated than that. Consider both perspective and psychic distance. “What matters is the emotional posture you’ve taken toward your characters and what short of narrative latitude you desire,” Almond says. “The trick to finding the right POV is striking the right balance between intimacy and perspective.”

Yes, it’s all about you. But the world only cares if you invest yourself in the details of form, and if you’re unwavering in your commitment to truth. As Almond says, “A big part of writing is about developing the capacity to expose yourself on the page, if not your life story, at the very least your prevailing anxieties and the people who caused them.”

Ready, Set...Market: How a Writer Knows If It's Ready

Scan advice from agents and editors, and you’ll find a common thread: too many writers send off their work before it’s ready. But how do you know when a piece is as good as it’s going to get?

This is trickier than it sounds. Part of the fun and frustration of writing is that a piece can always get better. Most published writers will tell you they’ve wished for changes even after their work came out in print. And while much writing goes off half-baked, it’s also possible to overcook a piece, to fiddle with it till it falls apart on the page, or to play with it more or less forever, thus staving off any chance of rejection.

Let’s assume you’ve engaged in that recursive process of discovery, prewriting and drafting and revising until you have what feels like a decent draft. You’ve let it set awhile, and in the most objective of ways you’ve approached it again. You’ve gotten critiques from a few trusted readers. Is it ready for market?

Even when your instinct tells you a project is ready, it’s good to go one more round, taking time to move through the project chapter by chapter, doing the same sort of writer-as-reader analysis you’d do on a good published book by another author. If your piece is an essay or short story, so much the better – there’s a lot to evaluate.

Handwrite your notes, both in the text itself – marking lyric moments, best parts, surprise and delight – and also in a free-standing list. Handwriting keeps your right brain involved in what’s essentially a left-brained pursuit.

Here’s what I look for. I’m not a big fan of checklists, so beware. This sort of analysis too early in the project tends to stifle creative energy. And this is my own personal list,  keyed to what I find engaging in narrative (fiction and non) and slanted toward my own shortcomings. Your ready-for-market survey might look quite a lot different. 

• The basics: notes on time, point of view, narrative distance, voice, and length.
• Beginning and end: Copy down the first and last sentences in order to study the frame for the piece.
• Scene and summary: List these, in order. For the scenes, note ways in which characters change from beginning to end. Note how backstory, if any, works in.
• Characters: What do the characters know about themselves? What are they blind to? Which feelings are articulated? Which feelings need to be articulated? In what ways are they larger than life?
• Arc: Where’s the set-up, the climax, the denouement?
• Surprise and delight: What feels most fresh and alive in the piece? Consider word choice, metaphor, humor, voice, plot, character.
• Suspense: Foreshadowing, not overdone. Consider what’s not said, what’s withheld, and conversely, what’s revealed and where.
• Language and details: Where’s the sharp, smart language? The humor, if any? Make sure nothing’s overwritten or over-explained. Even after a few rounds of revision, I find myself lopping off ends of sentences, where I’ve said too much.
• Lyric moments: Identify the ones you’ve got, and look for places where they should be.
• What it’s about: If you thought you knew and now you’re seeing something more, less, or different, that can be good, as long as you make the most of what you discover. Pay attention to how the focus is revealed to the reader. Sometimes it’s too obvious, sometimes it’s too subtle. Every story is two stories: identify both.
• Where you copped out: Consider the ways in which your project could be more than it is – more emotional depth, more distinctive voice, richer language, more layers.

Wise Words: Janet Fitch on Dialogue

We talk all the time. So what’s so hard about dialogue? In a lecture titled “Riding a Unicycle While Spinning Plates” (2011 Squaw Valley Writers Workshop), author Janet Fitch discussed the ways in which something so seemingly straightforward can go oh-so-wrong.

The first rule of good dialogue, Fitch says, is compression. She points out that while most real life talk is intended to avert conflict, the purpose of dialogue in narrative is to reveal conflict, to bring people to the point where they’re trying to do something to each other, as in a wrestling match. Emerging writers too often use dialogue for exposition or backstory, or they fill the page with useless chit-chat. “If people agree, they don’t need to talk,” Fitch says. “Only generic people speak generically. If anyone could say it, no one should say it. Every line should be a million dollar line, or get rid of it.”

Extending the wrestling analogy, Fitch notes how speakers in narrative often circle like wrestlers, looking for an opening. That means they won’t always come in from the front. In good narrative dialogue, each person comes from a different perspective, bringing needs, wants and desires in relation to the others. Interrupting and trailing off are ways that characters are revealed. “Rarely do people get to finish what they mean to say,” Fitch notes.

She also reminds writers that dialogue is always part of a scene that demands fresh, specific details. “Set up the scene for someone to say something specific and interesting,” she recommends. “Set it up so you see who’s stronger. Who will the reader put their money on? There’s always a winner.”

Bad dialogue, Fitch says, marches down the page without regard for gesture, vocal tone, or facial expression. “Line after line of vocalization means you’re missing the interior world and the landscape,” she says. Beyond dialogue, the scene should include exposition plus ongoing description of the characters and their reactions. And don’t forget landscape. “As they speak, people still have contact with the physical world,” Fitch says. “When people stop speaking, there’s ambient sound.”

Fitch also reminds writers that dialogue is not deposition. Characters gain advantage by not answering, lying, playing mind games, or through counter attack. Like a good boxer, a character should never respond as her opponent expects. “If it doesn’t surprise, don’t write it,” Fitch says. Neither does dialogue have to be linear, Fitch reminds her audience. The narration can shift inside a character and back into the scene.

The best dialogue comes from people who know each other well, Fitch points out. Years of backstory are implied, and conflict is easy to raise. “The better you know each other, the less you have to explain,” she says. “Either the reader will keep up or she’ll be piqued to read on. Writing is seduction: reply obliquely; allow a mystery.”

For a spot-on example of Fitch’s dialogue principles, consider this from Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, a brief dialogue scene involving Rolph and his older sister Charlie, on safari with their father and his girlfriend Mindy:

Charlie and Rolph lie together under a palm tree. Charlie disdains the red Danskin one-piece she chose with her mother for this trip and decides she will borrow a pair of sharp scissors from the front desk and cut it into a bikini.

“I never want to go home,” she says sleepily.

“I miss Mom,” Rolph says. His father and Mindy are swimming. He can see the glitter of her swimsuit through the pale water.

“But if Mom could come.”

“Dad doesn’t love her anymore,” Rolph says. “She’s not crazy enough.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Rolph shrugs. “You think he loves Mindy?”

“No way. He’s tired of Mindy.”

“What if Mindy loves him?”

“Who cares?” Charlie says. “They all love him.”

These million dollar lines are simple, their value amassed by who says them and how they’re presented. They do everything good dialogue should. There’s landscape and gesture. We weave inside Charlie and Rolph and back out again. These kids don’t agree, and they don’t come in from the front – they riff on each other to get at what matters most to each of them. They disagree over their mother, and over Mindy, and over what love means when it involves their father. Charlie wins this round, getting in the last word on Dad. The scene illustrates beautifully how conflict can be rich and deep without necessarily being strung tight. The lines spoken by these children manage to simultaneously reveal their innocence and their depth of understanding.

Child's Play: The Lyric Moment

Moments that are self-forgetful, concentration that’s perfectly useless. None of that sounds tough, or even important. But these are the moments we write toward, whether we know it or not.

“My intent is always to reach some unbearable moment where time slows down and the sensual and psychological details compress and the language always reaches into the lyric register,” says Steve Almond in Honey, This Won’t Take but a Minute. “The rest is just chewing gum and string.”

Almond’s stories often end with such a moment. Here, the final paragraph from “The Evil B.B. Chow”:

“Instead, I wander the docks, the old schooners burdened under ornate masts, the colonial cemetery dressed in gravestones, names and years in elegant rows, and roasted garlic everywhere, everywhere tourists in their pink summer legs and dusk on the bricks, rain gutters fat with pigeons and rooftops sprigged with antennae, the sediments of beauty, I mean, and the widows on their stoops, done with the suffering of men and silent before the soft click of bocce balls. There is so much time in this life for grief. So many men lying in wait. And here, tonight, there is a harvest moon, which hangs so heavily yellow above the sea it might be God, or my heart.”

What makes such moments unbearable? It might be sheer pain, or it might be sheer beauty or truth. These are the moments in which we feel most alive. Dani Shapiro calls them moments of being, those small and deeply internal moments embedded within our usual state of non-being, moments that in our writing we hope to capture in their deepest emotional purity. They’re important moments, but they’re not self-important – they’re real.

Too often when we reach for the lyric moment, we speed up (Important! Important! Got to get there, pronto!) in exactly the places we should slow down and allow the moment to expand on the page. Or sensing the importance of the moment, we overwrite it. The lyric moment is not meant for striving.

Consider the way children play, suggests Mark Doty in The Art of Description: lost in the present, entirely occupied. “In lyric time,” he explains, “we cease to be aware of forward movement; lyric is concerned neither with the impingement of the past nor with the anticipation of events to come. It represents instead a slipping out of story and into something still more fluid, less linear: the interior landscape of reverie. This sense of time originates in childhood, before the conception of causality and the solidifying of our temporal sense into an orderly sort of progression.”

  

Though musicality is implied, lyric moments don’t demand a certain style. In these moments language and truth and time intersect in what Doty describes as “an unpointed awareness, a free-floating sense of self detached from context, agency, and lines of action.”

To get at these moments, Shapiro suggests we access the specific and dig deep. We all know how, because we were all children once. We latched onto something – a toy, a rock, a stick. We forgot about time and went in deep and where we landed was that landscape of reverie, the place where children and writers abide.

That Pot of Gold: What to Do About Endings

Whoever came up with that bit about the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow was a writer. I know this for certain because I’ve searched certain craft books only to find that their advice about endings is, and I quote, “Good luck.”

It’s true that nailing the end of a narrative arc feels as tricky as finding the end of a rainbow. It’s one of those parts of writing that’s simultaneously easy to over-think and prone to dismissal. Let’s deal with this last part first. Allow me to get in your face for a moment and say that to excuse yourself from the problem of endings by pointing to stories that seem to have none is nothing more than a cop-out.

Let me offer as Exhibit A two hundred (give or take) students at Sand Lake Elementary. As part of a recent program there, I offered a sneak preview of my forthcoming Black Wolf of the Glacier (2013). I decided to read only as far as the artist had illustrated, which happened to be this: The girl in the red coat searched the woods.  Her dog sniffed the trails.  He whined and barked for his friend.  But there was no answer.

Whining? Try howling outrage. They all demanded to know how it ended. No, this isn’t just because they are children. Any story worth reading has a well-crafted ending. It may not be the perfect ending. You may not like it. But a good story doesn’t just stop.

In a talk given at the 2011 Squaw Valley Writers Workshop, National Book Award nominee Diane Johnson notes the dread that develops as you read a good book, the fear that the writer’s going to somehow muck up the ending. All we want, Johnson says, are endings that are clever and surprising but also in line with what came before, endings that are neither gratuitously happy nor gratuitously unhappy, endings that offer both climax and resolution. Is that so much to ask?

In a word, yes. Endings are hard. Between us and our endings, Johnson says, come haste, fatigue, literary fashion, personal blocks, and denials. Even in a fresh book, she says, endings will fit into patterns we recognize:

• Closure: This includes marriage, death, going home, or facing future more wisely.  Johnson warns not to sell out to cheap tears or easy laughs. Death can be poetic justice or indifferent; marriage a symbol of felicity. The traditional resolution of comedy, she notes, is the “triumph of hope over reason.”  Sometimes the hero is sadder but wiser.
• The “serves them right” ending: These are characteristic of our time, Johnson says, and include ironic inversions operating in the realm of poetic justice.
• Order is fractured or restored: This may of course include aspects of justice and/or closure. A force of nature may be at work here, engulfing or saving, but Johnson warns it can’t just take everyone out, no matter how much the weary writer may wish it were so.

Of course, conventions are meant to be ignored, and an unexpected ending is great as long as it works, which usually means there’s a set up. The ending starts at the beginning; in a good story, the tracks are laid, as David Vann says, in the first paragraph, but that doesn’t mean that we must write in such a linear way. My first novel began as an ending. I thought it was a short story until someone pointed out that if I told what led up to it, I’d have a novel. 

Sometimes writers are so concerned about endings that they won’t begin a project unless they can see their way clear to the end, in a formal outline or at least a fuzzy vision. Katherine Anne Porter, for one, said she wouldn’t begin a story until she knew the ending, and she always wrote the last page first. This sounds beautifully efficient, but it’s also possible that by committing to an ending before you begin, you pigeonhole the most interesting stuff that would otherwise rise up out of the subconscious. Other writers are more or less content to flail around until an ending rises up out of the narrative. This is not at all efficient, but sometimes the best route to truth is roundabout.

Every story or essay or poem has a great ending. The problem is finding it. Sometimes we’re just trying too hard. I was blown away in a recent workshop by how easily people who don’t write every day could in response to a prompt craft a full narrative arc, complete with ending, in fifteen minutes, while I was still loading my narrative guns. This has a lot to do with the pressing and urgent need to write, to spill ourselves on the page, a desire that people who write every day may have to fight to reclaim. Plus a little success yields lots of second-guessing. The uninitiated sometimes enjoy better access to their intuition, a direct connection to that elusive pot of gold.

Window on Your Characters

We all know how characters are revealed: by what they do, by what they say, and by what others say about them. Not a bad place to start, but for the writer it’s not enough.

Compelling characters also have self-regard. “Their emotions matter to them,” Donald Maass explains in Writing the Breakout Novel. “They do not dismiss what they experience. They embrace life. They wonder about their responses to events and what such responses mean. They take themselves seriously- and by the way, a sense of humor about oneself is the flip side of the same coin.”

Steve Almond one-ups Maass, warning writers not to settle for self-regard over self-examination. Navel-gazing isn’t enough, he says. Characters must look into the dark regions of their heart, those places they want to repress. Look no farther than Victorian fiction to see what kind of mileage writers get from characters who stifle their dark impulses. For that matter, look no farther than the modern tendency toward flagrant self-regard. Whatever reprehensible thing you might think, feel or be, you have only to out it and let everyone else figure out how to deal with it. (If you don’t recognize this attitude, you’re not paying enough attention to social media and reality TV).

Whether repressed or prideful, a character’s capacity for self-examination can be considered through the handy panes of the Johari Window, developed in 1955 as a tool for psychological assessment and more recently co-opted by business for team-building. After my characters have shown themselves strong enough to withstand my attempts to pigeonhole them, I break out the windows to help me figure out what they know about themselves and what others know about them. “Others,” by the way, doesn’t mean my readers or me. In the narrative universe, we’re demi-gods – able to see more than the players in the story, but never all-knowing.

The top left-hand pane of the window is the arena, or open area. Here reside those aspects of character that are visible to everyone. To its right is pane 2, the blind spot (sometimes called a bubble): those things others understand about the character while the poor schlep himself has no idea. Voice often resides here. As in real life, character aren’t usually conscious of how they sound.

Even the most introspective characters will be clueless about other aspects of themselves. When Rivka Galchen was working on her novel, she read a lot of real-life confessions, and what she saw time and again was how no matter how much people set out to confess, there were always some things to which they were blind, like Rousseau who confessed to nearly everything a man could, save admitting he’d fathered and abandoned five children. “That reading helped me understand how interesting it is to have someone be wrong about himself,” Galchen says.

Lack of awareness should never descend into pathos, but buffoonery works. “I think there’s a level of blind self-love in buffoonish characters and a level of delusion and a certain amount of well-meaningness that I find incredibly touching,” says author Chris Abani.

Pane 3 is where you put things characters know about themselves that others don’t see. This usually involves some sort of cover-up, either subconscious or intentional, which is why this pane is sometimes called the façade .“We are all telling the same two stories,” Almond says, “the one about who we want to believe we are, and the one about who we know ourselves to be. Nearly all the humiliating events in our lives (and, for that matter, in good prose) can be said to arise from the collision of these two stories.” When characters engage in intentional cover-ups, they’re taking themselves seriously enough to recognize the gap between these two stories and to try to conceal it; this subversion is in fact one of the first acts of “growing up.” In pane 3, we’re not playing around. It’s not bumper cars; it’s more like a nuclear reactor.

Pane 4 contains the unknown, those things characters don’t know about themselves, things no one else in the story knows about them either. But you – and your reader – may see them, or at least grope in that direction. There’s lots to mine in Pane 4. Deep shame and its counterpart mercy often lurk there. And while desire can fill any pane, it’s most interesting in this one. Ditto for grudges.  It’s because of pane 4 that we want to hang with our characters even after the story is over. Jose Manuel Prieto describes one of his characters in Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire “inexhaustible to me in his enigma.”

Once the unknown becomes known, it exits this pane for either panes 3, 2, or 1, depending on the character’s capacity and courage for self-examination. In this way, as Almond puts it, our characters become “unburdened of the glorious secret of who they really are.”