Tag: sympathetic imagination

Tension Begins with Character Tension Series Part 2

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People often think of tension in fiction as arising mostly from plot. If we were to put any character in the circumstances facing Harry Potter, wouldn’t there be tension? Let’s say Hermione were the protagonist. We’d still be worried if she attempted to take on Lord Voldemort. Of course, he wouldn’t have killed her parents, so she’d lack Harry’s obsession. She might be more sensible and let others lead. The wizarding world wouldn’t be the only real home she’d ever known, so maybe she’d give up at some point and move back in with her parents. The fight is personal to Harry, and that’s where tension starts.

What a protagonist wants or needs brings stakes to the action. Stakes connect a particular protagonist to a particular plot. Stakes mean that what happens matters. Tension mounts when wants or needs are obstructed (see Tension: The Secret to Storytelling) – the clash of oppositional forces, and not just in the plot, but on the level of character.

For the greatest tension, oppositional forces should be carried within the protagonist. The kind of characters who are out of balance inside. Whose survival systems are being exhausted, but who are still in resistance to change. Who are stuck in old patterns of behavior that are holding them back. Whose fears are blocking what they most desire or need.

Tension in character comes from these sorts of fundamental inner conflicts: resistance to change versus a need to change; fear versus desire. We get both the tension of the conflict and the tension of uncertainty. What will the character do?

As writers, we can increase this tension by pulling on both ends: making the want or need more significant and the inner resistance or fear even stronger. The outer setbacks and obstacles in the plot should give teeth to the conflict inside. The antagonist in the plot should be like a dark shadow cast by the protagonist’s flaws – the person he or she might become if he or she fails to change and grow. (More about plot will follow later in this series.)

Having our protagonists carry the potential for darkness makes them more credible and human. In any case, being a victim isn’t enough. If your protagonist is only in trouble from outside forces, you deny yourself the power of an interior arc of growth and change. You also risk compassion fatigue. But another reason is that inner conflict is a valuable source of tension. You want to use that. As you write, always try moving in the direction of tension to find your most compelling story.

Theme as a source of tension is closely related to character. The oppositional forces inside your protagonist should reflect the tensions in the theme. If you think of the central truth driving your fiction as being what at the deepest level you’re trying to say with your book, then your protagonist should begin in resistance to that truth. (See The Truth Behind Fiction.) Character is an embodiment of thematic tension.

In all these ways, the root of tension is character, no matter what type of fiction you’re writing. Character embodies the theme, drives the stakes, and carries the core tensions that will find their expression in plot. To orchestrate tension on the level of character, the most important thing is to stay aware of how your protagonist feels. This may sound simple, but it’s the hard work of sympathetic imagination. (See Writing as a Full Body Experience.) Try to internalize your protagonist’s deepest desires and fears to the point of actual physical sensation. To carry his or her core tensions in your gut. To sense what his or her reactions would to be everything that happens and make sure that gets reflected on the page. Not in a bald statement, but in how the characters speak, what they do, how they perceive things, and how they filter experience.

A strong protagonist is a story just waiting to happen. You’ll know you’ve found one by the tension he or she gives off.

My Tension Series examines the many opportunities for tension in fiction and ways to exploit and combine them. Next month: Stakes and Sympathy.



Voice is a Verb

Three riddles, all with the same answer: When we talk about inborn talent in writing, what do we mean more often than anything else? What attribute is most likely to make a novel leap off the page? What do many people write entire novels without understanding, despite its centrality and importance to modern fiction? Voice. Hard to teach and even harder to learn, except for those writers for whom it seems as natural as breathing.

Voice is often defined in terms of attitude, especially in first person, but it’s more than that. Voice gives us our lens, our scope, our storytelling rhythms, our sensibilities, our figurative language, and our potential for insight. Each new voice opens up fresh territory to us and confines us at the same time. Mark Haddon does a brilliant job of rendering the narrative voice of an autistic boy in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, but it has none of the edgy self-reflection which Joseph Heller brings to Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye. How could it? When a writer finds a voice, she or he also finds a particular take on this world – a unique way of experiencing and processing life. In first person, the writer essentially inhabits the main character, akin to playing a part.

The ownership of voice is more complex in third person. At one end of the continuum are novels in which the narrator is clearly distinguishable from the characters and makes comments, such as in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte or, more recently, White Teeth by Zadie Smith. At the other end are novels in which the third-person narration seems to be at one with the words, thoughts, and attitudes of the main character. The technique of free indirect style may be used to achieve a certain elasticity, at times moving closer to the main character and then farther away. This allows the writer to open up dramatic irony, as in Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, when Olive stands next to Jack Kennison as he lies in bed, both of them widowed, aging, and alone (pg 269):

“God, I’m scared,” he said, quietly.

She almost said, “Oh, stop. I hate scared people.” She would have said that to Henry, to just about anyone. Maybe because she hated the scared part of herself – this was just a fleeting thought; there was a contest within her, revulsion and tentative desire.

These insights somehow belong both to Olive, the character, and to the barely visible narrator. It’s as if the writer has stepped into the character and written from that inside place, but at the same time retained a kind of privileged discernment. Still, the dominant personality of the voice remains the character’s own. This type of voice may also progress through a series of characters in turn, colored differently for each one, as is the case in Strout’s book. In Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann, the voice shifts in every section, sometimes in first person, sometimes in third, each time taking on a markedly different set of attitudes and manner of speaking, in a tour de force on the power of voice.

I say elsewhere in these pages that fiction is the art of human empathy. Voice is that empathy given flesh. When we refer to “finding” a voice, we’re talking about the work of sympathetic imagination. Voice isn’t simply a noun, a thing, a conclusion; it’s also a verb, an action, a state of becoming. To voice is to express, to make known, to reveal. Voice is the ultimate show rather than tell: the distillation of our main characters’ personalities and histories into the very way in which we tell their stories.



The Love of a Writer

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Love amazes me, more often this time of year than any other. The love that drives an exhausted parent to endure the bright plastic torture of Toy R Us. The love that keeps a smile on the face of a Salvation Army bell ringer long after most of us would have left that bucket to fend for itself. The love that makes us tear up when the season brings back a stray memory of someone once dear to us. Love of family, love of friends, love of faith. One of the most striking things about fiction is how it can trigger love in us for people who aren’t even real. But I think it goes further than that: without the capacity for love, we wouldn’t have fiction writing. Fiction is the art of human empathy.

How many of us have been so worried about a character that we couldn’t bear to stop reading well past a sane bedtime? Literary or genre fiction, for adults or children, it doesn’t matter: if the character is well crafted, we care. The third and fourth Harry Potter books kept me up for a week. I’m still worried about Theo in Goldfinch. When distressed about the plight of overworked horses in England, Anna Sewell turned a horse into a distinctive character and engaged the sympathies of a nation. After all these years, I can’t get through a single chapter of Black Beauty without choking up.

Love happens with a character similar to how it happens in life. We as readers have to meet someone very specific and real. Not perfect. We need to perceive that he or she faces challenges, just as we face challenges. We need to see attributes that we can relate to, such as humor, self-deprecation, courage, vulnerability, determination. We need to feel that the character truly wants something to stir our wanting it for him or her. The problems need to be big enough to engage our sympathies and interest. And there need to be details – lots of telling details – to conquer disbelief and break down our defenses.

But the key is that love must happen first with the writer. We as writers need to believe in our characters and be fully engaged with their struggles. We need their reality to break down our own defenses as well. I finally fell in love with my newest protagonist a few weeks ago, after months of fine tuning her voice, delving her history, and reimaging her story. Before that, I had an unusual character who interested me, the beginnings of a voice, an original premise, problems that I wasn’t yet sure how to solve . . . but I wasn’t carrying the character in my heart. I had to keep asking her questions. Why do you care so much? What are you afraid of? Why does that hurt? What do you hope for? I had to discover her past to care about her present, even if not all of it would appear in the book.

Loving your characters doesn’t mean you should shield them. It means you should trust them, and trust yourself. You need to throw life at them, be hard on them, push them farther out to sea. Force them to become more than they were. Love means you care about them despite their foibles, but it also means you need to respect their right to make mistakes and grow. The love of a true friend or wise parent, or maybe we need to create a new category: the love of a writer.

At heart, isn’t that why we do this? For love. It’s the only way this crazy business makes sense. To share with others the stories of people whom we can only imagine, and yet believe are worthy of real empathy and understanding. Worthy of love.