With apologies to Mr. Thoreau, I don’t honestly believe that the great mass of humanity lead lives of quiet desperation. Most people, I have come to think, live lives of simple routine, blended with dollops of making-it-up-as-you-go-along. They come to crossroads in their lives and turn one way or the other not because they’re desperate and not because they’re dazzled by a sunbeam highlighting a particular path. They choose a direction based on whatever information and other resources they’ve got available right then. Only in hindsight does it become “obvious” that they had to go straight, or left, or in sudden reverse, or whatever.
But fictional characters: ah, yes, things are a bit different with them. They plod along, unaware they’ve been ascending a ramp rather than a simple road, and suddenly they realize they’re at a fulcrum. The course of their lives hasn’t been up a mountainside to a peak. It’s been up a see-saw: to take one step further will throw them off-balance, if not dump them entirely (as Dad used to say) ass-over-teakettle.
For a writer, there’s often a question of whether or not one’s characters should recognize the significance of such moments just before they happen — experience an epiphany — or simply deal with the consequences. It’s a tricky balance. Too few moments of truth, and the characters may seem too static. Yet too many epiphanies seem unrealistic, if not manipulative. How many times can you say He suddenly realized… before the reader thinks that your character’s just an unobservant dolt?
Take the New Testament story of the conversion of Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus — the bright light bursting from the heavens, the supernatural voice of a god speaking just to him…
Now imagine this guy stopping in roadside taverns and bars, telling all who will listen of this moment in his life. But then he goes further, and he goes further, and he goes too far: “And then there was the second time it happened!… And then just a couple months later, wouldn’t you know, it happened again only this time it wasn’t a bright light but a siren…”
Yeah, his listeners think. The siren of the booby-hatch ambulance. And then they turn their backs to him. Repetition doesn’t reinforce epiphanies. It waters them down, makes them ridiculous. So you’ve got to be sparing with them.
And yet sometimes a moment of epiphany appears before you, the author. You’re as surprised and eventually as altered by it as is your character. You can’t ignore such moments.
In Seems to Fit, most of the action takes place in 1988, in a small town in eastern Pennsylvania. But the main characters have known and been friends with one another for decades. Now retired, they’ve got lots of time to consider the course of their intertwined lives. And one of them remembers, in excruciating sharpness, the moment when his own life, under the influence of the others, suddenly turned.
This character’s name is Pierce de Borron, and from the very first draft of the book he surprised me with how important he became. From a conventional perspective, the book is not really his story at all; from a different one, it is no one’s story more than Pierce’s.
I’ll introduce you to him in a moment. For now, you need to know what the reader will know by this point:
- In the book’s main timeline (1988), Pierce is physically enormous — six feet tall, verging on 350 pounds. It’s not muscle, no. He’s fat. He’s not that heavy in this flashback to twenty years earlier, but he’s on his way.
- He’s the retired “Chief Administrative Officer” of a metalworking company, Castle MetalCo. Its owner and chairman was one Albert Castle (now also retired) and its CEO, Larry Weston (ditto).
- Al and Larry are best friends, and worked together at CMC for almost 40 years. But Pierce has always been a lonely outsider, and this didn’t change when he started working with Al and Larry.
- Despite his size, Pierce is strikingly graceful in his movements. His manner of speech echoes this delicate sort of precision. It’s a little old-fashioned and formal, and he almost never uses contractions when he speaks.
- Most of the book is told in the past tense. Each main character, however, gets a flashback scene or chapter to decades earlier, and these flashbacks are told in the present tense. (I think this mirrors the way many people think as they age, in which events long past seem more real, more present, than those more recent.)
(Per usual, please remember while reading that this is just a draft.)
In a change from my routine for excerpts of the book posted here at RAMH, you also need to know you will be asked for a password. (Long story.) That password? The last word of this post’s title.
DarcKnyt says
Character development … *sigh*. I can’t seem to learn enough about it and when I go through someone else’s way of doing it, I get bogged down, bored, lost and discouraged. Not necessarily in that order.
I don’t know why this is such a difficult thing for me. As a writer who wants to add a literary touch to my work, I need to know this, but can’t figure out how to get there. How to be so intensely interested in someone who isn’t real as to make them become real.
Anyway, I salute your work here JES! Bravo!
marta says
Hmmm, Darc. Interesting topic. I flatter myself that my characters are developed, but I rarely know what they look like beyond a vague–average height-reddish long hair–sort of thing. I’m one of those folks JES mentioned as making it up as I go. So, when writing dialog I just think, so-and-so wouldn’t say such-and-such like that, they’d say it like this…
But Darc, do you find people itneresting in general? I mean, I’m a fool most of the time and find every person I meet interesting for one reason or another. And if I think someone is boring or has the personality of dust, I figure I just haven’t figured them out yet.
In light conversation I can be as flip about someone I dislike as the next person. But when I’m actually taking to think, the person becomes more than that.
Then again, you hardly need to love humanity to be a writer. Plenty of misanthrops were great writers (um but I can’t think of a name right now). So clearly I don’t know what I’m talking about.
But it helps me.
And JES, you’ve been working hard! I’m impressed with the way you put your story together. I can never write cogently about anything I write.
Did that make sense?
Anyway, your work is bookmarked so I can come back and read.
moonrat says
Oh my gosh, I know Pierce. I went to high school with him, but we’d lost touch since graduating. And his name isn’t Pierce. But I KNOW it’s the same guy from your description!
Also, I love your first paragraph here.
John says
Darc: You might have set yourself some challenges which look more insurmountable than they are. Character development isn’t (I think, but whadda I know? :)) something you map out in advance; it’s something that happens naturally, as the result of a plot and other conflicts which present the characters with the opportunity to grow. (Or to shrink back from the opportunity, as the case may be.)
In what I think is your favorite genre, horror, a classic storyline — regardless of the specifics — pits an innocent, weak, or inexperienced protagonist against some enormous dark supernatural force or being. What happens if such a protagonist doesn’t change before the book’s conclusion? Right: s/he dies. The only way to beat the evil is to become better than it — stronger, smarter, more resourceful, more loving, or whatever, depending on your story.
And when you’ve done that, readers can point to your story and say: Whoa. Look at the way that character there developed! :)
marta: Real incisive questions and comments about Darc’s comment. Hope he stops back to read them!
People sure are interesting, aren’t they? There was a line in a Vonnegut novel — a character on his deathbed (or was he? can’t remember) wanted to know the answer to the question, What are people for? Sometimes I think that’s what fiction is for — to answer that question.
moonie: Glad you liked that paragraph. Maybe I should’ve stopped there, ha!
In my mind’s eye, the 1988 version of Pierce has Sidney Greenstreet’s build, but not his face — something softer than that. And for his voice, I imagine a heavyset actor who once did a commercial for Sunsweet prunes. He’s sitting in a chair talking to someone off camera about what he likes and doesn’t like about prunes. The off-camera guy hands him a Sunsweet prune, and he eats it, and his eyebrows bob in surprise, and he says: No pits! He says it just like Pierce says it.
Such a talented actor the guy had to be, to recreate, note for note, the voice of a character its author hadn’t invented yet!
cynth says
Okay, so I couldn’t help but look up the commercial. Did you know Stan Freburg did it? What a hoot! Here is the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiC9IBNlrGw
Oh fudge, I can never do that right…anyway, you can look at it for yourself. IS that what Pierce looks like? Or sounds like? I recognized him right away as Pierce.