Through the revisions of my current project, and with a lot of insights from our own Marquee Movies, I’ve been learning a great deal about fictional characters over the last several months. I think I’ve come up with a good way to express a critical distinction.
For most of my writing life before this present draft, I’ve for the most part always written about characters who must do something: she must escape from the underground kingdom and rescue the captive children; he must save his land from the oppressive tyrant; he must rescue the princess and her family; he must solve the riddle and protect the innocent . . . must, must, must. My characters have been defined by what they must do.
Something fundamentally different is happening in my present novel. I’ve been working to keep as the driving force in every scene who the characters are. What is the character feeling? What is she learning about others, the world, and herself as she carries out the must? See, I’m not saying the must isn’t there. Of course the characters still have a problem to solve. But instead of the problem defining who the characters are (“the ones who must tackle it”), their approach to the problem reveals the characters. I’m learning to be deliberately conscious of what the characters feel in every scene, and I think — I think — that makes the scenes vastly more engaging, vastly more real to the reader. Time will tell, of course.
All my life, as a writer, as a writing teacher, I’ve dwelt and hammered on the principle of writing for the senses. What does the character see, hear, taste, touch, and smell? And that’s all good, but it doesn’t take the writing far enough. The real question is What does the character feel? When we readers know that, we feel it, too. Think about it: when someone tells us a story of personal experience, it’s the tales in which we feel what the teller felt that we remember long after the telling. Accounts of being embarrassed . . . angry . . . frustrated . . . scared half to death . . . overwhelmed with gratitude or love . . . those have power. Write for the senses, yes; but even more importantly, write for the heart. If you’re doing both, you have the kind of narrative that readers will feel viscerally and that they won’t be able to put down until it’s done.
This point was driven home for me when Julie and I saw the second installment of the new films based on The Hobbit. I’m a settings guy, so I’ve been in love with every glimpse the filmmakers have given us of Erebor, the Kingdom Under the Mountain. But Julie really saw Erebor for the first time when she saw how much it meant to Thorin to finally get there, to be home, to be in the halls of his fathers. She felt what Thorin felt, and it brought the setting to life.
In most of my previous writing, I’d been neglecting to pay attention to that spark. I love world-building, I love getting the details right, I love action and dialogue and atmosphere and plot and symbol and poetry. Oh, do I love places! Sometimes I’d get the character emotion exactly right, but I was doing it “through a glass darkly” — a flame moving behind me, reflected in the mirror. It wasn’t my focus or my concern. But to engage readers, it’s the most important thing.
Now, at last, I’m practicing doing it consciously, paying full attention to it. I couldn’t be happier with the results.
Now, this may be an area for discussion. In the past thirty years or so, the fiction industry has made a huge distinction between “literary fiction” and “genre fiction.” In general, the “literary” world has looked down on the “genre” world as being vulgar entertainment, a lesser art in which mere plot is all-important, while the “literary” story or novel focuses on a character’s journey: a rise or a fall, an odyssey toward maturity or a deeper understanding of self, an exploration of the human condition. I was appalled — absolutely appalled — a day or two ago, when I was reading a recent issue of Poets & Writers, in which a literary agent was being interviewed. The question was about what the agent looks for in a query, and the agent said s/he gave very serious consideration to “Is the writer coming from a solid program?” — meaning that, to this agent, it is extremely important that the submitting writer be involved with an MFA program. What?! A degree for the writer is a consideration in whether or not you like the story in your hands — in whether or not you consider the story salable? To me, that thinking is far more alien than Great Cthulhu.
To a degree, this dichotomy and snobbery is morphing, at least for most of us, thank Heaven. Tolkien and Lewis took some criticism from their scholarly peers for writing about elves and magic and the like — hardly stories of the proper gravitas befitting their education and position. But both have stood the test of time and have “come home” to a wider acceptance in academia. Lovecraft has found his way into series of classic, influential literature. Writers such as Margaret Atwood and many others blur the lines between speculative fiction and literature. Three cheers for the magical realists, Marquez, Borges, and the like! Let us shelve them in mainstream literature and love the fantasy they write!
In my observation, genre fiction is now being held to a higher standard than it was in, say, the pulp era. Readers today expect a character who feels, who learns and grows. Readers expect a depth of research and a degree of social consciousness, even in stories about Faery or other planets.
Here’s where my questions begin. Are we, as readers and writers, moving to embrace a new model of storytelling, or are we returning to an old one? Many of us on this blog cling to The Lord of the Rings as the best of the best; but Tolkien has been criticized for his lack of attention to character development. To use my title distinction for this post, LOTR abounds in characters who “must.” My Agondria stories have been reproached for being “like the Homeric epics,” rich in story and action but not full of overt, expressed character feeling like the stories of today. Do the Homeric epics fail to deliver character emotion? They must be doing something right to have survived as long as they have, to have inspired so many retellings. Did audiences of the past “feel” from different story cues? Has our way of experiencing stories changed with our culture over the millennia and centuries and decades? Does Shakespeare engage you? Do you feel what his characters feel? How about Dickens? And Julie raises a further interesting question: to what extent does our current cultural expectation of story have to do with the fact that well over half the readers and so many of the writers and editors are now women? Homer and Shakespeare and Tolkien were men; but it wasn’t men who wrote the Harry Potter books or Twilight or The Hunger Games.
Lots to discuss here. Talk amongst yourselves. Go! Heh, heh!
Julie says: 
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