Characterization

Source: Novakovich, J. (1995) Fiction Writer’s Workshop, Cincinnati,
Ohio: Story Press, ‘Character’, pp.48–66; ‘Setting’, pp.25–42.

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Most people read fiction not so much for plot as for company. In a good piece of fiction you can meet someone and get to know her in depth, or you can meet yourself, in disguise, and imaginatively live out and understand your passions. The writer William Sloan thinks it boils down to this: ‘‘Tell me about me. I want to be more alive. Give me me.’’

If character matters so much to the reader, it matters even more to the writer. Once you create convincing characters, everything else should easily follow. F. Scott Fitzgerald said, ‘‘Character is plot, plot is character.’’ But, as fiction writer and teacher Peter LaSalle has noted, out of character, plot easily grows, but out of plot, a character does not necessarily follow. To show what makes a character, you must come to a crucial choice that almost breaks and then makes the character. The make-or-break decision gives you plot.

Whether or not there’s a change in you, character is not the part of you that conforms, but rather, that sticks out. So a caricaturist seeks out oddities in a face; big jaws, slanted foreheads, strong creases. The part of the character that does not conform builds a conflict, and the conflict makes the story. Find something conflicting in a character, some trait sticking out of the plane, creating dimension and complexity. Make the conflict all-consuming, so that your character fights for life. (I would add to this by saying whether the character is aware of this fight or not, the conflict, fight is essential).

Examples

Think of the basic character conflicts in successful stories. ‘‘The Necklace’’ by Guy de Maupassant: Mme. Loisel, unreconciled to her lower-class standing, strives to appear upper class, at all costs. Out of that internal conflict ensues the tragedy of her working most of her adult life to pay for a fake necklace.

‘‘The Girls in Their Summer Dresses’’ by Irwin Shaw: Though married and in love with his wife, a young man is still attracted to other women.

In Henry James’ ‘‘The Beast in the Jungle’’: John Marcher waits for some extraordinary passion to take hold of him; he dreams of it so much that he does not notice he is in love with May Bertram, who is at his side all along. Only when she dies, of neglect, does he realize it.

In ‘‘The Blue Hotel’’ by Stephen Crane: The Swede, visiting a small town in rural Nebraska, imagines that he is in the wild West and consequently sets himself against a bar of ordinary people whom he imagines as gamblers and murderers.

In all these stories, characters suffer from a conflicting flaw. Aristotle called these character flaws hamartia – usually interpreted as ‘‘tragic flaw’’ (most often hubris or arrogance) when we talk about tragedies. Sometimes, however, a flaw may not lead to disaster, but to a struggle with a subsequent enlightenment.

A flaw could result also from an excessive virtue. Look at the opening of Michael Kohlhaas by the early nineteenth-century German writer Heinrich von Kleist:

Michael Kohlhaas ... owned a farm on which he quietly earned a living by his trade; his children were brought up in the fear of God to be industrious and honest; there was not one of his neighbors who had not benefited from his goodness and fair-mindedness – the world would have had every reason to bless his memory, if he had not carried one virtue to excess. But his sense of justice turned him into a robber and a murderer.

Since his horses were abused at a border crossing between two principalities, and he could not get a just compensation in courts, Kohlhaas takes justice into his hands and burns down the castle where the horses suffered. In addition, he burns the city of Dresden, which protected the offenders. His sense of justice provokes a war. His uncompromising virtue may amount to vice – certainly it’s a flaw, the plot-generating flaw.

The dictum that ‘character is plot, plot is character’, attributed to Henry James (in Novakovich, 1995) is a familiar one, similar to Shakespeare's ‘Character is destiny’ (from King Lear). This is not to say that what happens to characters is inevitable or predetermined. It's simply that particular characters seek or attract certain events or encounters. If you start by building a strong sense of your main character or characters, then add a dilemma, challenge or conflict, you will automatically be generating your plot. Starting the other way around, with a chain of events into which you then fit characters, can often be more difficult and less convincing.
Character + conflict=plot