Tag: characters

On Character Building

August 12, 2014 / Alice Thomsen / 0 Comments

I’m working on creating a character. This is something I’ve done before. That’s not to say I’m an expert at it—just that I’ve done it. Only this time it’s different, because I’m creating a character for myself.

No, I’m not writing a memoir, or a story with a protagonist who’s a thinly-veiled version of myself (at least, not intentionally). I’m also not getting into LARPing.

Fall semester is approaching fast, and six days from now, I’ll be standing in front of a class of twenty-five comp students, most of whom are in their first semester. And I’ll be trying to present a deliberately-crafted version of myself.

I tried that last semester, in a way. My students found me, for the most part, either strict and intimidating … or timid and insecure. Three guesses which of those was a more accurate reading—and there are only two options, so with three guesses, you have no excuse to not get it right eventually.

A professor of mine compared teaching to performing, and I think it’s an interesting analogy. I put on my teacher costume—a blazer, a plain top, nice pants, simple shoes—and get on my teacher stage and use my teacher voice (but sometimes slip and use my normal voice and have students come up to me after class to ask me what I said because it was impossible to hear from the back of the room). But I haven’t really created my teacher character. What does she want?

Some answers that are unacceptable:

avenge parents’ murder (doesn’t work when your parents are alive and well)
achieve fame (if you can’t handle a twenty-five person audience, the spotlight is not where you want to be)
win the big competition (a university teaching award doesn’t count as big)
slay the dragon (killing your students, even the mean ones, is frowned upon)
get the guy/girl (ditto sleeping with them)

So what does my teacher character want? I don’t have a good answer yet, but I have at least a nugget of what she doesn’t: She doesn’t want to seem intimidating. Avoiding timid would be pretty great, too.

Week 7: Chapters vs. Stories, Part III, Section A

October 6, 2013 / Alice Thomsen / 1 Comment

This week marks the more-or-less midpoint of my linked stories course with Cathy Day, and the last of our reading-focused classes. (Up next: workshops.) We started the semester with the least linked stories, Short Cuts, and worked our way toward more and more tightly linked pieces, finally reaching today’s book, A Visit from the Goon Squad, whose second-edition cover identifies it as a novel.

To my regular readers: This will be a stylistic departure. I’m preparing this post as the first of two to be shared on our class blog, where you can follow along with us.

To my new readers: Hi. My name is Alice, and I’m here to talk to you about …

What We Read: A Visit from the Goon Squad

A Visit from the Goon Squad is the result of Jennifer Egan‘s challenge to herself to write a book with chapters “as different from each other as possible, yet still adding up to one story.” ^(source) After an interview with Egan, Emma Brockes observes,

The idea for Goon Squad came to her after her reading group got stuck into Proust. It took them about seven years to plough through In Search of Lost Time, during which she became obsessed with how to represent entire lifespans, non-sequentially and in the way people actually experience them, that is as a constant negotiation between reflection and anticipation.

The twelfth chapter of Goon Squad is written as 12-year-old Alison’s autobiographical slideshow, complete with sound effects (if read online, as was Egan’s initial expectation). Another story is told in second-person. Still another is a news article. Different narrators, different protagonists from one chapter to the next, different time periods over forty-some years—and now identified as a novel?

Our Activity: Reorganizing Goon Squad

Because of the delightfully mixed-up nature of this book, an obvious exercise is to experiment with different ways of ordering the chapters. What would happen, for instance, if we extracted all the chapters that prominently feature Bennie? Or Rob’s death? What if we put them in chronological order as best we can?

Pictured: Kate Gutheil and Ashley Mack-Jackson with chapters sorted into character-based arrangements

(A past, particularly ambitious reader had done something like this already. Tyler Petty went through the book and outlined the timelines for twelve different characters.)

As we reflected on this task—the difficulties in mapping out an exact timeline, the costs of every rearrangement—someone declared that Egan had already put it in the best order. Prof. Day said, “I know.”

Takeaways

The order of chapters/sections/stories in a book goes a long way in determining how it’s read. Chronological Goon Squad, for instance, doesn’t have the same emotional effect, because information gets doled out differently. Good Squad organized by major character loses the interwoven, interdependent feel.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that a more conventional structure is always bad. It just means that organization should never be taken for granted, that we shouldn’t default to one form because that’s how it’s usually done (or for the sole purpose of being different) without thinking about how it will serve the book we’re writing. We need to take time for these questions, to make these decisions deliberately, open to the possibility that the first way we try it might not be the best. (We also have to recognize that there are Tyler Pettys out there, so if we’re going to play with chronology, we better make sure we double check our math.)

What I Learned

I’ve experimented some with chronological deviation in novels and written chronologically-ambiguous short stories, mosaics of scenes whose temporal relations aren’t explicit but are clearly not chronological. But I haven’t written—or contemplated in-depth—something with the scope of Egan’s book. The questions and considerations presented by a project like Goon Squad are fascinating (if somewhat daunting). The most important thing, though, was that reminder that no decision should be taken for granted in writing, and that there are questions worth asking that I might not think of at first.

What’s next?

In a few days, I’ll share the second half of our class activities, which focused specifically on that twelfth chapter.

Something in that I don’t like.

October 1, 2013 / Alice Thomsen / 0 Comments

When I was young, I played a computer game called Logical Journey of the Zoombinis. I don’t remember much about it, except that the goal was to successfully navigate bands of Zoombinis from one side of a map to another, solving logic puzzles to avoid perils along the way.

One of those puzzles requires you to suss out the pizza preferences of a couple troll-like creatures. You offer them different toppings in combinations until they’re pleased. Until they’re satisfied, they’ll respond to your offers with either, “More toppings!” or, “Something on that I don’t like,” flinging the pizza away in rejection.

Screw up too many times, and your little Zoombini server gets booted out of your party.

In related news, I recently read Sideways, by Rex Pickett.

I recently read Sideways and, on several occasions I found myself with an urge to fling the book away and declare, “Something in that I don’t like!” That something, I realized quickly, was the characters.

The characters in Sideways spend a majority of the book drunk. Should've followed their example. I might've enjoyed it more. #tooharsh?

— Alice Thomsen (@AliceThomsen) September 11, 2013

I’ve read plenty of books with central characters I disliked, though, and I wasn’t always struck by the urge to fling them away … which makes me wonder what, exactly, that difference is.

There are all sorts of reasons I dislike people, some of them more legitimate than others, so perhaps that’s part of it—different characters are unlikable for different reasons. I enjoy a charming sociopath, for instance even if the sociopathy outweighs the charm and I don’t actually like the character. Perhaps the most striking example from my recent reads is Horns, by Joe Hill. There are a few characters whose heads we get to inhabit, and none of them are particularly likable—one of them, in fact, becomes something akin to the devil. Yet I enjoyed the book, to the point that I’ve recommended it to several friends.

Those Sideways characters, though. They have inspired me to warn several friends away from it (or else assure people who meant to read it before watching the film adaptation that really, they didn’t miss anything).

The New York Times recently published a pair of short essays by Moshin Hamid and Zoë Heller on the matter of unlikable characters. Hamid observed:

I’ll confess—I read fiction to fall in love. That’s what’s kept me hooked all these years. Often, that love was for a character: in a presexual-crush way for Fern in “Charlotte’s Web”; in a best-buddies way for the heroes of “Astérix & Obélix”; in a sighing, “I wish there were more of her in this book” way for Jessica in “Dune” or Arwen in “The Lord of the Rings.”

Then, though, he goes on to note that, “In fiction, as in my nonreading life, someone didn’t necessarily have to be likable to be lovable.”

It’s an important distinction, likable vs. lovable, and one that—in different ways—we’re all familiar with. It’s like that line that gets floated around in different fonts, superimposed over different images: At some point you have to realize that some people can stay in your heart but not in your life (or some variation thereof). We’ve all been there, loving something that was not, by objective measures, good—a person, a behavior, a life state, whatever. But goodness—likability—isn’t the primary criterion we use sometimes.

Few would argue in defense of Dr. Lecter’s dietary preferences. And yet we love him. Or, at least, I do.

So what’s a writer to do with this? Likable might not be good enough to be lovable, and unlikable still needs to leave room for lovable.

The short answer is, I’m not sure. Writing always has an element of trial and error, the same as in real life. I can list off characteristics of people I love (in a broad sense) and although that’s a start, it doesn’t mean I’ll love everyone who meets those criteria—or that I won’t love anyone who doesn’t. I have to actually interact with those people. Still, here are some points I would put out:

a lovable character has agency (we can pity a victim, but pity isn’t love)
a lovable character wants something (otherwise it’s just a lazy afternoon with an echoing, “I dunno, what do you want to do?”)
a lovable character makes decisions (we, as readers, are along for the story’s ride; we need more from a character)
a lovable character faces a genuine but potentially surmountable obstacle (if it’s all smooth sailing, or if there’s no reason to hope, we have nothing to wonder about, and wonder is a key component of love)

That’s an imperfect list, of course. (You’ll notice that much of it has as much to do with story as with character. Separating the two seems, in ways, a pointless exercise, because one without the other loses either its context or its importance. But that’s another matter entirely.) If you have any to add, leave me a comment.