It’s a bit of two-for-one day here at Casa de Corbett—I’m posting not just here but with Deborah Crombie over at Jungle Red, where we’re giving away a free copy of The Art of Character.
Why am I defying laws of physics by appearing in two places at once?
Because we’re a week away from the pub date for The Art of Character, and in between popping open the Dom Perignon and soliciting celebrity piggyback rides, we’re trying to amp up the volume on the book’s release.
If you want to know the story of how the book came about—Deborah’s preoccupation—trundle on over to Jungle Red.
Here I just want to speak briefly about why I think the book is helpful, and maybe even important.
Some of the best books on writing in recent years have emphasized structure—specifically Robert McKee’s Story and John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story. And though both books deal with character, Truby’s in somewhat more depth, I found there was something lacking in both that needed addressing.
Though both books and a few others deal brilliantly with the function of character, and discuss how the character is a crucial element in the story matrix, they leave largely unaddressed the trickier, subtler, more difficult, and thus most interesting parts of characterization—giving the character recognizable feelings and desires, contradictions and secrets, letting her think and feel and behave like a real and complex human being, not a plot puppet.
As I emphasize in the book, it’s important to think of the character not as just a cog in the story, but as a real individual, with a life “outside the narrative,” to whom the events of the story happen.
And it’s not enough to “take dictation from imaginary beings.” A great many clichéd characters sprang fully formed in their creator’s imagination precisely becaue they were derivative—vaguely concealed duplicates of other characters.
There’s no short cut. To create great characters you have to spend time. You have to feel deeply and imagine wisely. You have to ask a hundred questions and answer them not with your mind but with your heart and your intuition—and characters aren’t always quick or straightforward with their answers. Patience and attention are required.
The books I did find that dealt with this aspect of characterization didn’t take it far enough, in my opinion, or didn’t deal with it sytematically and comprehensively. On top of that, they were written in a style I found leaden, contaminated by “how-to.”
A character can’t be fashioned from ideas, or stitched together from parts, no matter how clever the tropes. You end up with a Frankenstein, not a Frank Galvin, or a Frank Pierce, or even a Frank Chambers.
But few if any of the books on writing I reviewed, even the ones I admired, offered any real guidance on how to conjure that organically whole yet emotionally complex hobgoblin we think of as a fully realized character.
I took only the mininum number of English classes in college and never took a creative writing course. I learned most of what I know about writing from trial and error—plenty of the latter—and breaking down scenes in acting school, where the importance of a physical and intuitive connection to the character was hammered into my over-analytical brain.
Writers lack the physical presence of the actor, and can’t rely on it. We have only words. How is it done?
I wanted to help writers figure that out by helping them move through each of the stages of characterization, from conceiving the character—and being wary of characters derived from the story, the finishing school for plot puppets—to developing the character, to understanding that character’s role in the story, to techniques for rendering her on the page.
I emphasize the importance of scenes, not information, in not just portraying your character but conceiving and developing her.
And I stress the need to plumb one’s own experience, emotions, and memory to create the intuitive facility you need to perceive your characters like figures in a dream, not pieces on a chess board—or the product of a checklist.
Last, I wanted to write the book in such a way the reader would feel not just informed but inspired. I wanted readers to feel compelled to put down the book and return to their desks and forge ahead with whatever they were writing.
From the response the book has garnered so far, I think I’ve been largely successful. Now the book needs to find its target audience: writers, whether just starting out or perfecting their craft.
If you’d like to try for a free copy, go to today’s posting on Jungle Red.
And if you’d like to pre-order the book, you’re only two clicks away, beginning with this one here.
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What are the easiest and most difficult aspects of characterization for you?
Who is the most interesting character you’ve come across in a book, play, film, or TV program lately?
Among the characters you yourself have created, which one’s your favorite? Which one was hardest to create or get right? Which one was easiest?
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Jukebox Hero of the Week: One of the points I make in The Art of Character is that a writer who writes for himself is "scribbling to a ghost." We write for readers, because the reader makes us honest.
But it's often important to personify the reader we're trying to reach, and envision that reader as someone who expects our very best.
The actor Joseph Chaikin wrote that he never went onstage without imagining Martin Luther King, Jr., in the audience. Since we celebrated Dr. King's birthday Monday, I thought it might be appropriate to choose this tribute to him from the late great Solomon Burke. It's a beautiful song about persevering despite the gnawing doubts that plague even great men and women, and the humility that comes with true courage:
I can no longer remember where I first heard that, but I’ve come to realize it’s one of the truest insights into writing and the writing life I’ve encountered.
An example: I have a tendency to see the trees not the forest, to get lost in the rough, to marvel at the minutiae and miss the big picture. This isn’t just true of my writing. It defines my life.
I’m so obsessed with getting things right, with not making a mistake, that I dwell on details far longer than I need to. I over-complicate, listening to my nag of a brain instead of my gut. Over and over, I have to remind myself: What's the goddamn story? Keep it simple, stupid.
It’s one reason I write so slowly. It’s also the chief reason why it took me so long to silence my inner critic and let go of the cancerous perfectionism that kept me from accomplishing anything. I’m not a late bloomer. It just took me too long to escape the prison of my own self-doubt.
Two weekends ago I taught a class I blithely call The Outer Limits of Inner Life, and it’s intended to get students in touch with the real life people and experiences that, knowingly or not, form the raw material for their fiction.
As Jim Harrison remarks in his novella, “The Man Who Gave Up His Name” (I’m paraphrasing here, having just spent half an hour trying and failing to track down the actual quote in my copy of the book): The sad truth remains we don’t get to be anyone else. The inability to accept this fact accounts for the questionable psychological states of many Hollywood actors. Look at them. See the folly whirling in their eyes.
I normally conduct this class by leading the students in a series of exercises: first, to acquaint them with a number of people in their own lives who have had some kind of emotional impact, from chain-smoking grandma to the kid who threw up on the teacher in second grade; two, to explore moments in their own pasts that were particularly charged—moments of profound fear, or shame, or love, or pride. In this way, I hope to root them in their own emotional truths, keep the folly from whirling in their eyes.
But due to the economy (I like to think), my enrollment was down: I had just two students. I threw out the lesson plan and said, Let’s focus on what you’re working on, and I had them tell me in detail about the novels they were writing.
Turns out, this was the best way to get at what I’d originally planned to teach. Go figure.
One student (his name is Richard) was a criminal lawyer with a long history of major trials, and he was writing, not surprisingly, a legal thriller. He’d had three agents almost bite, but had been told his protagonist wasn’t engaging enough. (I actually address this in another class I teach called The Protagonist Problem.)
As Richard got into the various scenes, he admitted he had his own doubts about a decision he’d made—the protagonist, being new to criminal law, makes a fundamental error early in the book by being too trusting of his client, and believing too wholeheartedly in his innocence. This mistake sets up much of the later action.
For whatever reason, I had this gut-instinct impulse. I asked Richard why he himself had gotten into criminal law—he was clearly a well-educated, middle class guy, not a former cop or street tough who’d gone legit with a bar card. Richard admitted that, as he was clerking after law school, he'd done a few criminal cases pro bono and had found he was good at them. He even got a second-degree murder verdict for a man who’d killed three kids in a drug deal gone wrong—when everyone was sure the defendant would get the death penalty. But Richard also remembered shaking the client’s hand after the verdict was announced, and feeling repelled.
I said, “You have to use that. It’s too vivid not to.” And we worked on making that contradiction—realizing you’re good at something that nonetheless creates a profound moral qualm—a core element of his protagonist, down to the skin-crawling handshake.
Instead of being naïve, the hero now puts too much faith in his talent. He’s a gambler, not a Pollyanna. This instantly makes him more interesting. But he also has this revulsion of genuine lowlifes, which ironically causes him to trust the wrong people. His arc pivots around the revelation that sometimes the person who seems morally repulsive is exactly the man you must rely upon—and the people you thought you could trust are the actual snakes—which sure enough was right there in the story all along.
Bingo, as Aristotle used to say.
The other student—we’ll call him Jim—was working on a police procedural with a lone wolf detective who’s nearing retirement but can’t quite let go. I asked the obvious question: Why is this guy a cop? Jim said it was because the job permitted him the means to live the life he wanted: a solitary existence, with a marriage long settled into routine, neither warm nor loveless, and a surfing sideline.
I told him that didn't ring true for me, and it diffused his hero's sense of moral purpose. Cops become cops because they have a sense of justice (at least the ones in books do, and a lot of the ones I know personally as well). They’re almost afflicted with a sense of responsibility, even if their own lives are a shambles due to irresponsible choices.
I let Jim talk some more about his hero, and it became clear that the cop was haunted. His loneliness was a choice, and something was bugging the bejeebers out of him. I said there just seemed to be something in his past, something he did or failed to do, or something he witnessed, that has eaten away at his soul ever since. It was clear from everything I was hearing, but Jim hadn’t yet honed in on it.
We talked it through a little more, proposing this, conjecturing that, and suddenly, the light went on in Jim’s eyes. “I know what it is.” It turned out to be something the hero didn’t do that has gnawed at his conscience. He was walking on the beach in Marin, he saw two kids struggling in the surf about thirty to fifty yards from the beach. He wanted to go in to save them, and knew he could with a rope lashed around his waist, but the two people on the beach with him talked him out of it, and the two kids drowned.
“Who were the two other people,” I asked.
“A cop,” Jim said, “and the woman who would become his wife.”
And yes, this wasn’t imagination. This had happened to Jim. And I said, as I had with Richard: You have to use this. By finding this personal link with his hero, Jim felt a newfound interest in him, a depth of insight he hadn’t had before.
A writer has only four tools: research, experience, empathy and imagination. The urge to rely too much on imagination—whether from sheer cleverness or a belief our own lives are too mundane to be of any use—steers us away from the core emotional truths and raw experiences that make us who we are. But those same emotions and experiences are what we want from our characters. We feel obliged to be inventive, when the truth is right there, in our past.
But as always, it wasn’t just my students who learned something. As the class was nearing its end, I talked about the novel I’m currently working on, and problems I was having getting into the main character.
The working title is The Wrong Girl, and the story’s based loosely on a case here in my hometown. Two girls were abducted six months apart by a child predator. The girls bore a very strong physical resemblance to each other: eight years old, slim, long dark hair, dark eyes. The first girl was still missing when the second was taken, but the second girl managed to escape after three days. (The first girl, they’d later learn, was long dead.)
Everyone admired the pluck of the girl who got free—until it leaked out that the reason she was so resourceful was because she came from a family of gang members. And sadly, ten years later, that girl was working the streets, in constant trouble with the law, despised by the cops who once considered her a hero.
I took this idea and built on it. That girl would have to live with the realization that everyone wished it was the other girl, the good girl, who survived. What was the message in that? You don’t matter. The trauma of her abduction, her abuse and imprisonment, would only be compounded by knowing that all too many people, even her family, would be perfectly happy if it had been the other girl who escaped. What would it take to save that kid’s life, to lure her back from whatever disaster she was calling her life at age eighteen?
Despite having worked for fifteen years as a private investigator, I’ve never written a PI novel—largely because I don’t see myself or the job I did within such books. PI novels are westerns, with the plains gunman transported to an urban setting. But Charlie Huston has urged me to forget all that and write what I know about the job, and this book will be the maiden effort. It features a PI named Phelan who’s been hired to find the girl, who’s name is Jacquelina Garza—Jacqi, she calls herself—get her to show up for court, and in the bargain he’s hoping to distance her from her poisonous family, find her some kind of stable life so she can turn things around.
But whenever I told this story to people, they always asked: Why does the PI care? And that’s exactly what Richard and Jim asked. And my answer was found wanting. I said he realizes that he’s the last chance she’s got—after him, the abyss. He feels responsible.
Richard said, “I get it here (pointing to his head), but not here (pointing to his heart).”
And so the teacher was obliged to suffer his own lesson. I needed to plumb my own experience. I gave Phelan my own nagging perfectionism, driven by a feeling he’ll never be good enough.
But I dug deeper than that. I realized I felt somethng for this girl because I too had a sense that I didn't matter. I was a blue baby, Rh+ when my mother was Rh-, back in the day when this could prove fatal. I almost died at childbirth, and was quarantined from my mother for six weeks, a critical time, we now know, for bonding. And my mother would often, particularly when she had a bit too much to drink, gaze at me and with saccharine sentimentality tell me that she wasn't supposed to have me, but she was glad I'd come along. And the guilt and misgiving in the message always came through loud and clear. What I heard was: You're not supposed to be here. And it gave me my kinship with Jacqi, haunted as she is by: You don't matter.
But I didn't stop there, for I knew there was more within me that responded to this story, but I wasn't getting there, wasn't facing it head on. So I gave Phelan a bit more of my own biography -- I married him to a stellar woman who died too young, a woman who herself fled home at fifteen, and who often said, if not for a friend’s family who took her in, she might have died on the streets.
This gives Phelan a gut instinct for how close a kid can get to being lost forever, because he was married to a woman who was just such a girl. And sadly, yes, he’s lost her forever. He knows the stakes. But he also feels that amorphous irrational guilt all survivors carry, feels it acutely, because his wife’s love was the only antidote he’s ever known to the poison of his own self-doubt.
And he knows what his wife would have him do. He has to do what someone did for her. He has to show this girl that sometimes you really do find a person you can trust, someone who truly believes you matter. He has to become that person—no sanctimonious bullshit, no noble altruistic look-at-me, no trying to reincarnate his wife through her or, on the other hand, saying glibly: It's just my job. A kid like Jacqi Garza will see right through all that nonsense and he’ll lose her for good. It’s the hardest thing he’s ever done, like walking a tightrope between selfless compassion and Zen-like non-attachment. He has to be utterly committed and at the same time willing to walk away. He has to be brutally honest, tough as nails, and as open-hearted as a ghetto nun.
But if he gets it right, if he can lure this wild child off the street and into a safe place, maybe for once he can tell himself: At this, at least, I’m good enough. But if that becomes his motive, he'll fail.
There. Now I've anchored my story in my heart and soul. It means something to me, something essential and yet something mercurial, difficult, as yet unclear, worth exploring. I'm ready to write.
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So Murderateros, which of your writing problems can be tracked back to personal problems? When have you reached into your own life and found exactly what you needed to make a character or scene come alive?
Has your own life ever betrayed you in your fiction? Have you needed to step outside it and rely on empathy or imagination instead, because your own experience seemed to be holding you back?
And last: Does my story resonate with anyone of you raising teenagers -- that need to care but not show it, to be there but also step back just a little, let go?
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Jukebox Heroes of the Week: Given the tone of this post, plus the fact we're saying goodbye this week to so many of our comrades in arms, some for good, some for just a while, suggested the following song, written by Steve Earle and sung by Emmylou Harris:
I so loved Stephen’s post on character yesterday I wanted to continue the discussion, from a slightly different angle.
First I just have to say this. In just a few paragraphs – tiny black marks on paper, or bits on a screen – Steve put a REAL PERSON into our heads. An unforgettable person.
That’s great writing. But I don’t think you can break it down into the words he used and what order he used them in. It’s not a technical skill so much as – well, as another Steve says in On Writing – it’s telepathy. Steve - Our Steve - was struck to his core by a unique human being and so moved by the experience that he used his own being to communicate that profound encounter to us - whole - so that we could have that encounter with Henry, too…
AND IT WORKED.
How awesome is that?
That is the real magic of writing.
And that doesn’t have a lot to do with details, really. It has to do with ESSENCE.
Note what SJS didn't put into his characterization of Henry. He didn’t say what he was wearing (didn’t need to - we’ve all seen how men dress to move furniture). He didn’t say if he was married, with or without children, gay, straight. He didn’t give us his long and involved back story, what kind of cereal he likes, what team he roots for, what side of the bed he sleeps on, what his astrological sign is. There weren’t even any descriptions of fascinating tattoos.
I’ve seen character bio forms that have writers list all of those things and more, and they always make me uneasy. It’s too much information. A character comes through not because of a mountain of details, but because of those one or two unmissable things that define him or her – in this case, Henry’s infinite patience and presence in a frustrating, mundane situation (and the contrast of that personal serenity in the body of a bruiser.).
Steve’s portrayal of Henry doesn’t have much to do with the words he used, either, with technical skill. Oh, we need technical skill all right, but mainly so that we don’t get in our own way while we’re writing. We learn all those things, the words, the pace, the grammar rules and how to break them, iambic pentameter (yes, we all use it if we’re writing in English…) – but that’s just a pianist’s scales, or a dancer’s barre work. We do those things so that we have a finely tuned instrument that is always ready on a moment’s notice to communicate the pure ESSENCE of a character (or love scene, or fight, whatever we’re needing to communicate in our story.)
I think I’m going on about this because – well, of course it’s what I do, but also I’ve been thinking about the essence of character because I went on a Reacher binge recently and caught up on a few of the older books I hadn’t read yet. And then I wanted more, and I started up rereading the ones I’ve already read.
As I have confessed here before, I’m not much of a series reader. I realize that part of it is that I am generally doubtful and cynical that any one author can continue to build depth and complexity in the same characters for more than three or four books. And that’s if they’re really good and really lucky. With a series, I am always bracing myself for ennui to set in. Now, I think TV can do series brilliantly – but TV has the incredible advantage of having ACTORS along with a whole staff of writers looking after character development. And actors are fanatically devoted to exploring their particular character, exclusively. That specialization and focus can, in the best of circumstances, carry TV characters much farther than authors are usually capable of carrying them. That’s by no means a slight on writers, it’s an acknowledgement of the art, craft, magic and specialization of actors.
But Lee Child’s Reacher is an exception, and so is Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch, and that has to do with unbelievably great plots, for sure, but I think it also has to do with character essence.
In any Reacher book you care to pick up, on the first few pages you are going to find this character who is almost always out on the open road, and preternaturally observant. Okay, sometimes you meet him right before a fight in which he is always outnumbered and always the last man standing, but the fight will be portrayed moment by moment so that we experience Reacher’s mental and psychological calculations at every second of the action. I don’t much think about what Reacher looks like – muscle seems to have very little to do with anything that happens. In fact, Reacher is huge, but is constantly dispatching bigger and stronger men because he’s fighting with his brain. It’s the Sherlockian powers of observation, whether in a fight or in the course of an investigation - that are compelling about the character.
There are a few other constant, essential things about Reacher that make him unique. He HATES a situation in which a big guy, whether an individual or corporation, is dominating or oppressing a weaker person or entity; he is driven to right that imbalance time and time again. He hates having any encumbrances – house, clothing, place, or even money. And he must have the companionship of an intelligent, unique woman to feel balanced and whole - that is, as balanced and whole as Reacher will ever even temporarily be (he doesn’t say this, but it’s constantly played out).
Harry Bosch is another character I never get tired of. Harry was devised with a particular back story of being a tunnel rat in Vietnam, which – without being stated – gives a sense of why this man is damaged. And Harry is wounded, no doubt – while he is often heroic, you worry about him, wonder how he even gets through a day, sometimes. As an LAPD detective, Harry is constantly up against overwhelming forces – it’s not just about the case he’s working on, but the bureaucracy and sometimes malignance of the police department in general, or superiors in the department in particular. Sometimes the very family Harry is trying to help is working against him. Sometimes there’s a bigger, amorphous evil like racism. In fact, there’s always a sense of a greater evil that might finish Harry off for good. Harry is on some level aware of these larger forces and still he goes out there and does his job with a dogged determination that is both relentless and slightly – autistic, is the word that comes to mind.
Of course both Reacher and Harry are wounded knights, an archetype that has captured the popular imagination for hundreds of years, if not since the beginning of time.
I loved Denise Mina’s prickly, scrappy Paddy Meehan instantly because of her in-your-face Scottishness. Irishness. Mongrel-mixedness. She’s a new journalist from the wrong side of the tracks and too young to have any practical experience who ends up uncovering more than any of her male colleagues combined because of sheer cussedness. The lone woman up against a force of often hostile male colleagues has always done me (the brilliant BBC series Prime Suspect is one of the best examples I’ve ever seen) because it’s so true to my own experience. Paddy’s also like Tess’s Jane Rizzoli, who startled me as a female lead because she is so desperately unhappy, so NOT a Cinderella. In the book which was Jane’s introduction, The Surgeon, Jane DOESN’T get the guy – she nearly gets killed instead. She gets no respect on the job because she’s a woman and she gets no respect from her Italian family because she’s a woman. And experiencing her pain and outsiderness made me a devoted fan.
Margaret Maron, to me, captures the essence of the South in her Deborah Knott books. Margaret’s own laser perception masked by that “Who - little ol’ me?” Southern slyness oozes through in Deborah.
Cornelia’s Madeline Dare is a fascinating character to me because she lives in – or at least has lived in – a world that is completely alien to my experience, and yet I completely relate to her razor-sharp smarts, wicked tongue, and feminism. SJS’s Hayden Glass being driven by this demon of addiction is compelling to me in essence. Ken Bruen’s Irish cop Jack Taylor’s essence to me is his wide-open heart and purity of soul.
Okay, you know what I want from you today. Who are YOUR favorite series characters and what is it about them – what is the essence - that draws you back, again and again?
I have been fretting this week about questions and comments I’ve gotten, publicly and privately, which I guess go along with the territory of teaching and blogging and writing about writing as if I really know anything at all about what I’m talking about.
(But I have to say there have been a few questions that I should never have gotten at all - it’s mystifying. For the record, if you have a grammar question, DO NOT write to an author to get the answer. That is not our job, you will have burned a valuable opportunity to ask something actually worth asking, and it will make us crazier than we already are, and you really don’t want to do that.)
All these questions, aside from the grammar ones, have made me want to say this again, and repeat it often:
While I blog about, and write about in the Screenwriting Tricks workbook, a formula for film structure that is widely used in Hollywood, the MAIN POINT of what I am always writing about here is that you study the specific structures of movies and books in your genre and that specifically appeal to you, so that you can discover the specific tricks that great storytellers use to create the stories you love.
And whatever it is you think they’re doing, you might try doing it yourself.
That is the bottom line of every single thing I have ever written about writing.
It’s the same with creating character.
As much as I get asked to teach, I never teach workshops on character. Not solely on character, anyway. I just don’t. It’s not that I couldn’t figure out something to say. It’s just that - as I’ve said before - I think writers live with characters in our heads on a daily and nightly basis. I could be totally wrong, but I suspect people don’t become writers if they don’t have characters living in their heads. We don’t live with structure quite so intimately, and therefore it seems more teachable.
And honestly, I very, very rarely hear anyone say anything about creating character that makes me think – WOW, that’s it, I get it now. Of course, I've never taken Rob's class on character but that's only because he's refused to let me in.
But I see other workshop instructors at conferences handing out character charts, breaking down movies or stories I know pretty well myself, and will occasionally swipe one of those charts to see what the secret might be, and am sometimes absolutely horrified at what I see.
Case in point… people love to break down The Wizard of Oz. God knows I understand that. I’ve used tons of examples from Wizard myself. We all KNOW Wizard, so it makes sense to reference it. But The Wizard of Oz is such a special case. It is an iconic movie for reasons that I wouldn’t possibly want to have to explain – it’s like explaining sunlight, or – a rainbow. You can break it down into its elements, but that will never give you the experience. There was a special magic looking over that movie through all its harrowing changes of writers, directors, actors, etc. - and let's not forget that it was based on a classic SERIES of books - and, oh, yeah - it's a MUSICAL. And all that terrifying mess somehow combined to make a classic. It is not something anyone could ever duplicate.
It’s confusing even to break the movie conveniently into sequences, because it is a musical, and musical numbers were cut and rearranged (and rightly so!) which would have made the timing of the sequence structure make more conventional sense. Just as an example - the studio wanted “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” cut because it made the first Kansas sequence too long, but the movie gods apparently intervened, the song remained, completely screwing with the sequence timing, and film students have been arguing about the Act One break ever since.
So when I see the characters of a movie like The Wizard of Oz dissected on a chart, I am wary and skeptical. I am hard–pressed to believe that you ever even come close to developing a story as rich and enduring as The Wizard of Oz based on the two-dimensional layout of a chart.
Just consider what The Wizard of Oz would have looked like had Shirley Temple (often named as the top choice for the role) been cast instead of Judy Garland, as Dorothy.
The casting of Judy Garland, and her lush, just blossoming, completely vulnerable sexuality, TOTALLY changed the dynamic of the character and every single interaction she had with the other characters in the movie. It changed the meaning of the journey. A young woman’s dream, or fantasy, or metaphorical journey – whatever you want to call that adventure to Oz – is completely different from a child’s. Teenagers yearn for significantly different things than children do.
When I was a preteen I became firmly convinced that the whole Wizard of Oz journey was Dorothy's dream letting her explore which one of the three farmhands she wanted to marry - as a young woman reaching marriageable age, those would be her obvious choices in such a farm town. In Oz, Hunk/the Scarecrow is the first one she meets, and over and over and over again the Scarecrow steps forward as the problem solver and her biggest defender. (She also dances with him in a musical number that was cut from the final film – The Jitterbug, and as any dancer or choreographer knows, when two characters dance in a musical, that means they've just had sex.). When she leaves Oz, she tells the Scarecrow she'll miss him most of all, and when she wakes up in bed, he kneels by the bed and she touches his face. She's chosen.
I would tell people this occasionally in college and they'd laugh - but years later I read much more about the elaborate history of the film and learned that the final scene of an earlier script really had concluded with Hunk going off to agricultural school and winning a promise from her to write to him – implying a romance that would continue (and marriage once “The Scarecrow” had his real-life diploma).
What I’m saying is, there was a structure built in to the script, as well as the magic of casting, that resonates in a way that is not capturable on a character chart.
Okay, you might be saying now that I'm the only person who’s ever watched the Wizard of Oz and gotten that out of it. But you're wrong. My author sister friend Ann Voss Peterson has always felt the same way, so there. And even if there weren't at least one other person who sees the truth of it - my analysis of the subtext is meaningful to me, just as my analysis of Ophelia’s role in Hamlet is, and my strong personal opinions on the movies I watch and the books I read, however obscure they may seem to other people, have been invaluable to my growth as a writer.
Plus, I have more to say about what makes Dorothy a great character.
Another level of my take on Dorothy - and I know I'm not alone in this one - is that she is going through an inner journey to internalize the qualities of braininess, heart, and courage - and her higher self, Glinda - so that as she grows into a woman, she will be able to use those qualities against enemies like Miss Gulch instead of running away as she does at the beginning of the movie.
And another big change that happens with Dorothy is that we see her in situation after situation go from a scared little girl who needs protecting to a woman who will step forward and protect her friends. It's a big character arc for a teenager, growing up like that.
I guess what I'm saying is that a LOT goes into creating a character, and even if some writer or teacher or workshop leader breaks it down brilliantly for you, it’s even more important to figure out what YOU think is going on with that character.
And I’m also saying - and this is very true of the Wizard of Oz film in particular - sometimes it is absolutely impossible to track how something was written. There were so many writers, directors, artists, producers who worked on this one - somehow certainly the movie gods were watching over it to create the alchemy that makes it the classic it is.
Some things are quantifiable, but some simply aren’t. And please don’t be satisfied with anyone else’s quantification.
You are the writer. Ultimately, it’s you and the page. You are God, baby. Make your own rules.
So I'm snowed in here in Raleigh, after being in 90 degree Cozumel four days ago. My body has no idea what it's supposed to be feeling anymore.
Since I'm not going anywhere today, does anyone have any unique interpretations of movies or books to share? Some deeper theme you're convinced of, but somehow no one else sees it?
I never watched Law & Order when it first aired, and to this day I've only watched a handful of the original L&O episodes. But in 2005, after I quit my "day job" and started writing full-time, I used to watch re-runs late at night as I came down off my caffeine high. The spin-off that hooked me was SVU. The original L&O has many of the same elements as SVU, but SVU has--for me at least--the most interesting characters, both the series stars and one-show stars.
Anyone writing crime fiction, mysteries or thrillers should at least invest a couple hours watching L&O, though I think the lessons learned would benefit most commercial fiction writers. There are other shows that "teach" the same lessons (HEROES, for example) but L&O is the most obvious.
1) Enter Late, Leave Early
Most writers want to over-explain. They like hefty set-ups, establishing character and backstory, and "setting the scene." If you watch L&O you'll see they start each scene just after the beginning of the scene. They don't show Olivia and Elliott driving to the scene of the crime, they show them AT the scene of the crime--often after the CSI team have gone through it to give them information they need.
Sometimes, you want to show the painstaking CSI investigation--to establish clues or a red herring. But most of the time, it's unnecessary. L&O has done a great job in showing us the parts of the investigation we need to see to stay invested with the story, but keeping other parts off-scene in such a way that we know it's going on, we can "almost" see it, but it's not in front of us. We never think they aren't covering all the bases even when we don't see them working each piece of evidence. Truly, masterfully done.
Leaving early is just as important. I'm a big offender of this--sometimes, my characters think too damn much at the end of scene, prolonging the story. While it's important to get inside your character's head, it's best to do it as much as possible during the action of the scene to avoid long narratives between scenes. Scenes should answer story questions as well as ask story questions--so going into the scene you give your reader information and/or answers; then raise more. Leaving a scene "early" provides a great venue of such story questions, as well as cliffhangers to get the reader to turn the page, start the next chapter, finish the book.
WARNING: Entering late and leaving early is a great way to keep your story moving at a brisk pace. But after reading hundreds of thrillers, I've noticed that some never let up. You're worn out because there is NO downtime. Sometimes, you SHOULD move into a scene slowly or wrap up a scene more completely, or even offer a "quiet" chapter so that your reader isn't overwhelmed with one action after another with no let-up. I've found that these less frantic scenes are well-suited for right before or right after major story turning points, such as crossing the first threshold, the mid-point, or before (or after) the black moment (all is lost.)
Strong pacing is important, but strong pacing isn't non-stop, story-on-steroids pacing
2) Shades of Grey
I have always been fascinated by moral dilemmas. My first Lucy Kincaid book, which has been postponed to Spring 2011, deals with a complex moral dilemma. We in society often have sympathy for people who do the wrong thing for the right reasons, and often we have compassion for people who take the law into their own hands when they've played by the rules but were victimized.
Any one remember Dirty Harry? Wasn't it MAGNUM FORCE that had cops killing criminals who'd beaten the system? On the one hand, it's the worst betrayal of trust and duty to have cops kill in cold blood; on the other hand, many of us believe it's unfair--and plain wrong--for violent offenders to beat the system and walk the streets, knowing that they'll kill again.
We believe in the justice system because it is the most fair, but at the same time it is flawed. When I first learned decades ago that John Adams defended the British after the Boston Massacre, my gut feeling was how could someone fighting for Independence defend murderers? Yet, Adams believed so much in the system of a fair trial that I realized that his defense of the system was one of the backbones of our fight against British tyranny. If we denied them a trial, we were betraying the country we were trying to create.
Few situations are black-and-white. We all have opinions and values that are important to us, but rarely is there a case in which anything we believe is all-or-nothing. It's the shades of grey that make a story compelling--because life is never simple, nor most of the decisions we make, nor our values which have taken a lifetime to develop.
L&O explores many of these shades of grey, which makes the stories "page-turning." Tonight I watched an episode from a few weeks ago called HARDWIRED about a group of predators who believe that sex between adults and pre-pubescent minors can be "love" and "consensual." During the trial of the leader of the organization that was similar to NAMBLA but different, they had a girl testify that when she had a sexual relationship with the leader (when she was 11 through 14) that she consented, that because of him and his love for her, she got out of her abusive family home, moved in with her grandmother, and ended up staying in school and getting her Masters. While we all would (hopefully) agree that a sexual "relationship" between an 11 year old girl and a 30 year old man is vile and wrong, we can't help but think what might have happened to the girl had she stayed with her physically abusive father, that the school and her drunk mother failed her, and this sick pedophile helped her get out of the situation. Fiction, yes, but we all know that there are good people in bad situations. It doesn't make the relationship right, but it makes us pause and wonder how we, as society and human beings, could fail in such an atrocious manner that an 11 year old girl sees sex with a 30 year old as her only way out of a miserable life.
This is just one example of the "shades of grey" that L&O explores so well--without over-explaining or being preachy--that I find intriguing, and speaks directly to the next, and perhaps most important point:
3) Characters Are People Too
In a one-hour drama, it's hard to convey well-rounded, full characters who you believe really exist. In a series it's easier, but every show runs the risk of two-dimensional stereotypes. CASTLE is my guilty pleasure, and it's probably the worst at surface characterization. I just can't help myself, I like the show. HEROES does a better job at creating characters who are neither all-good or all-bad, who are complex and flawed and sometimes do the right thing for the wrong reasons; or the wrong thing for the right reasons. But L&O is masterful at characterization. The series repeat characters have grown over the series, but in many ways they haven't changed drastically. We understand them and how they will react in certain situations, and that is comforting even when they don't act as we would. They are staying IN CHARACTER. The supporting cast provides just as much depth. They don't agree on everything, they argue their points effectively, they are not all perfect or all flawed. And even more important, they don't have to agree on everything and they can still work together effectively.
But it's the guest stars, whether famous or not, who make the show. Some bad guys are just bad. Some are bad but you have sympathy. Some are more complex than others. Some lie, some don't. They are REAL. You feel like you've really caught a snapshot, or a short video, of their life. If a one-hour (44 minute!) program can create REAL, complex characters on television, we as authors should be able to do the same in a 100,000 word novel--while adhering to point #1 above. They use stereotypes effectively to keep the story moving (not everyone needs a backstory shown, like the traffic cop who relays information, of the paramedic who has two lines) but smoothly, so you don't *think* stereotype. But the characters important to the story have depth.
So what have you learned from your favorite TV shows?
Wednesday, January 23, 2013 at 3:01AM in 
