In a short story, of course, one may not have time to explore all these particular aspects of this character. But I can’t think of one great novelist, from Madame de Lafayette (La Princesse de Clèves [1678]) through Joyce (Ulysses [1922]), who does not particularize her or his characters through at least some of these situations, somewhere or other through their books.
Now one can take the “list method” of character development and run it into the ground. When I was seventeen, a writer of successful juvenile novels gave me an eight-page mimeographed form he claimed he used to help him construct characters. In proper Harvard outline form were questions like:
I. How does he react outdoors?
A. To weather?
1. To rain?
2. To sleet?
3. To sun?
B. To geography?
1. In the mountains?
2. By the sea?
II. How does he react indoors …?
As an experiment, I took a character in a story I was working on (a skindiver, I remember, who had come with an American team to work on underwater oil wells off the coast of Venezuela) and wrote out nineteen pages of “characterization,” following the guide.
Needless to say, I lost all interest in completing the story.
Leaving my particular points to generalize a bit:
The confusion in following most sorts of literary advice usually comes from the author’s confusion as to what is happening in the author’s mind and what he can effect in the reader’s.
I don’t think the writer has to understand the characters to write about them. The writer does need to see them. The reader, however, does need to understand them; if the reader figures them out for herself, the writer has “created” all that more vivid a character than if the writer explained them away. The writer must see and put down those things that will allow (not make: you can’t make the reader do anything—not even open the book) the reader to understand. If you can (figuratively) close your eyes and see Sam as sixteen, six feet tall, and heroically self-assured, fine. But you will have to pay more attention to the vision of the story than certainly most adventure plots allow for.
The juxtapositions of traits that make up a “hero” are, alas, comparatively rare. That is why a “heroic” hero needs a good deal of characterization if our sense of psychological veracity is not to be strained past the breaking point very fast—precisely because she is a psychological (as well as a statistical) anomaly.
I don’t think a writer’s understanding is going to hurt the writer’s (or should I say, the reader’s) characters, in and of itself. However, what we understand with exhaustive analytical thoroughness we are not too likely to be interested in enough to fictionalize about with intensity—since the actual fictionalizing process itself is a form of synthetic analysis.
The thing to remember about characterization—direct characterization, in which you write about a person’s psychology and the specific things which have shaped it to its particular form—is that, in most stories, a little goes a long way. As Oscar Wilde noted more than a hundred years ago, the more characterization you have, the more your character comes to sound like everybody else. Therefore what most writers want (Proust, Henry James, and Robert Musil notwithstanding) is a little very telling characterization, rather than lots of very precise characterization.
It is intriguing that the writer of the past hundred years to discuss most systematically what goes on in the writer’s mind when creating was the French poet Paul Valéry, and that he produced an amazingly hard-headed aesthetic in which the words “precision” and “scientific” appear over and over. He himself began as an engineer. Mathematics and engineering supply most of his nonliterary specimens of the creative process.
A poet, his particular concern was poetry. But much of the impetus behind fiction is close to the poetic impulse. In an essay on La Fontaine’s Adonis, he says in passing: “Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.”
Whether she is writing about what she thinks could, should, or might someday exist or might have once existed, or whether he is dallying with some future fantasia so far away all subjunctive connection with the here and now is severed or is writing about the most nitty-gritty of recognizable landscapes, the writer has still become entranced with and dedicated her- or himself to the realization of what is not. And all the “socially beneficial functions of art” are minimal before this aesthetic one: it allows the present meaning; it allows the future to exist.
—San Francisco
1969
On Pure Storytelling
—for Vonda N. McIntyre
[Talk delivered at the 1970 Nebula Awards Banquet in Berkeley]
I think the trouble with writers writing about writing (or speaking about it) is the trouble anyone has discussing his or her own profession.
I first came across this idea in E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927): you’ll do better writing about something you’ve only done a little of, because you still preserve those first impressions that make it vivid, even to someone who has been doing it for years. If you write about something you have been doing day in and day out, though you would recognize those impressions if someone else were to recall them to you, you yourself tend to pass over them as commonplaces.
Therefore, contemplating what I was going to say this evening, I tried to go back and capture some of my initial impressions about the whole experience of writing stories, or even my first encounters with the whole idea of stories and storytelling.
The catalyst for my ideas this evening was a book I passed recently on the shelves of the Tro Harper bookstore. It was a large-sized, quality paperback, with a red cover, published by Dell: The Careless Atom by Sheldon Novick.
Sheldon Novick …
The last time I heard Sheldon Novick’s name was fourteen years ago. He was several years ahead of me at the Bronx High School of Science. There was a strange half dozen years when the Bronx High School of Science held a whole gaggle of fascinating people at once, including, among others, Stokeley Carmichael, Bobby Darin, Todd Gitlin, Peter Beagle, Norman Spinrad, someone else who is currently writing the motorcycle column for The Good Times under the nom de plume of The Black Shadow, and Marilyn Hacker.
As I said, that was the last I’d heard of Shelley, till two weeks ago.
The first I’d heard of him was several years before that. We were at summer camp. Some dozen of us had taken an evening hike from a place named, for unknown reasons, Brooklyn College, to another known as The Ledge.
There was a campfire.
Several marshmallows had, by now, fallen into it. We were a quarter of the way up the back of a forested hill, pretentiously called Mount Wittenburg. And it was dark and chilly. You know the situation: smoke in the eyes, your left cheek buttered with heat, your right shoulder shivering.
Somebody said, “Shelley, tell us a story.”
“What do you want to hear a story for?” Shelley said with disdain, and licked marshmallow from his fingers.
“Tell