The Art of Character

By David Corbett

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.

If you’d like to read an excerpt (“Serving and Defying the Tyranny of Motive”), check out this post on Zyzzyva. (Another excerpt will appear a week from today on Narrative Magazine's Tumblr page.)

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:

Self-expression? Is it?

- by Alexandra Sokoloff

I attended an event last weekend where I was in a mix of people from wildly diverse backgrounds, which included a fairly intimate dinner, and we had a chance to all go around introducing ourselves and what we do, and of course instantly you get that validation of Just How Cool being a writer is if you don’t actually have to do it every day, especially those days when you know you're never going to get that subplot to work.  (Oh!  Right!  Yes!  It’s cool!)  

One woman was enthusing about self-expression – how great it must be to live a life that is totally about self-expression.   And for the life of me, I couldn’t understand what she was talking about.  

But she seemed so sure, and so I tried to get into her mindset, because I wanted to understand, but I didn’t see where the “self” part was coming into it.  

I don’t know about the rest of you, but if I pray anything at all before I lie down to work  each day (because now you all know I don’t SIT down to work) it’s something like this:   “Please God/dess, Universe, Angels, Fairies, Story Elves – let me serve this story and make it whole and somewhat readable and also marketable, please, thank you, Amen, Sat Nam, Ashe, etc.”  

It’s not that I don’t put myself into what I write – I know I do.    I put my whole life experience and observation into what I write, all the time.  I write on the themes and the subject matter I write because I care passionately about those themes and subjects.   But what I am and what I’ve experienced and observed and care about is only useful as it serves the STORY.   In fact, I myself am only useful as a channel to serve the story (although I have many other fine qualities as a person, but we are talking about me as a writer, now.).  

But what this woman said really got me thinking about what we do, as writers – how we define what we do.   And self-expression has almost nothing to do with my job description, as I see it.  

I think what I do is create an EXPERIENCE for a reader or audience.   Reading a book or seeing a film (and I’m talking about fiction, now, and especially genre fiction)  is about getting completely out of yourself and going on a journey as someone else, or multiple someones, and LOSING yourself in that experience – an experience that is solely in your mind, but can sometimes be far more gripping than anything in real life.  

Actually (and you can tell me if I’m being just too Hollywood for words) – you could say what we do is create theme park rides.  Some of them very smart ones, but still, theme park rides.   You could also say we create dreams.    We take our readers through a dream.  And our absolute, bottom-line goal is to create a dream state so hypnotic, so mesmerizing, so enticing - that readers/viewers get lost in the dream.     And I’ve actually heard editors say this over and over again on panels – that the number one requirement they have for a book is that it doesn’t break that dream state.  

Think about it.  Isn’t everyone’s favorite review a sincere: “I couldn’t put it down”?  

Hmm, now that I’ve put it like that - are we much more than pushers, really?   

Okay, maybe I’m digressing.   But now that I have put it like this, do you see what I’m saying when I say that this has very little to do with self-expression and everything to do with being acutely attuned to serving the EXPERIENCE - the needs of a reader/audience?  

I am a genre writer.   I am very aware that I was continually hired in Hollywood because I could deliver a certain experience of spookiness and sensual chills.   As a novelist I continue to deliver that experience of spookiness and sensual chills.    I am privileged as a novelist (much more so than I was as a screenwriter) to be able to bring my specific, warped tastes to the stories I tell - but my bottom-line mandate is to deliver the experience.  

And my other bottom-line mandate is to serve the story.  I am not doing my job, I cannot calll myself a novelist, if I do not deliver the STORY.   That is: an uninterrupted dream of an experience, from beginning to end.  

Now, as Lincoln said, “You can’t please all of the people all of the time.”  We need look no farther than our Amazon reviews to realize that not everyone will have the experience of our stories that we hope that they will have.    But our best chance of pleasing as many of the people as we can, as often as we can, is being as true to the STORY as we can be.   And in my experience, that’s about acknowledging what I want to experience in a story – and then committing to get out of my own way as much as I possibly can, in order to let that experience come through me, unimpeded by some need for “self-expression”, so that I can provide that experience, uninterrupted by ego, for other like-minded people.  

This may be an analogy that makes sense only to me, but I will try to explain it anyway.    When I got involved with dance, first it was because I was acting, and dance training just increased my chances of being cast in productions I wanted to be in.  I worked hard, really hard, to learn the language of dance, to make my body an instrument that was capable of dance.   Then I kept dancing even when I wasn’t acting anymore because – well, because the endorphins made me less likely to have a complete nervous breakdown.   And I kept dancing and training and improving just because I was actually really good at it and nothing else made me feel so much like myself, and it wasn’t at all about being cast or anything except the fact that not doing it was agony.  And then, after all those years, I was actually good enough to get paid for it, pretty much accidentally.   

Well, I’m sure a lot of people think dance is all about self-expression.   But when for the first time in my first professional show I told a choreographer “That pose doesn’t feel like me,” and he looked at me in that totally dom way that choreographers have and said – “What do you have to do with it?” -  it suddenly clicked for me that professional dancing is about serving the dance.    I – and my body – were really just props – a medium of expression for something much, much bigger.  

And that’s how I feel about my writing.   I have honed my “instrument”, as actors say – after years and years of work I have the technical skill it takes to write, to deliver the complete experience of a story.   But all of that technical craft is just so that the story can flow through me – from wherever the hell it comes from.  

Self has something to do with it, no doubt.   But mostly, we have to leave self behind, get out of our own way, and serve the story.   And hopefully – hopefully - deliver the experience our readers are looking for, hoping for, wishing for, when they pick up our books.

So am I the only one who feels this way?  Do the rest of you, or most of you, feel that your writing is about self-expression?  Or how would you describe what it is that you do?

- Alex