One of the joys of reading as a writer, beyond the joy that is reading, is all the swell learning on offer.

I’ve been loving my way through Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War hexalogy, and throughout Manning’s taught me quite a lot about character description and why it’s better not to be so comprehensive on this front — something I’ve been messing up in this latest project.

As a consequence, Manning’s also really helped me to rethink what I’ll call Character Action Economy. As I and many other writers have emphasized repeatedly, Characters are best understood through multiple frames and approaches: what they say, think, do, their relationships, etc — but nothing helps to sell a character like their actions.

The actions your characters take, like their relationships, are precisely what makes them legible to readers — what makes readers recognize your Characters as people (or people analogs).

Manning is awesome on this front, but for very specific reasons.

First and foremost she doesn’t tolerate idle characters, not even minor ones. Manning might have a gift for portraiture but her characters are never still lives; they are always up to something, always on the make, always taking actions that reveal their Character and therefore are always coming through to the reader.

No wonder Manning doesn’t always need to describe her Character’s particulars in full — she sketches the important details, provides the Character punctum — and then lets the Character’s actions do the real lifting.

But what I’ve noticed — and this is really the point — is how scrupulously Manning stays away from defining Characters through a single habitual action.

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These past months I’ve plunged down the Olivia Manning rabbit hole. In the middle of all my other reading, I’ve managed to read book four of her Fortunes of War hexalogy (God, what I wouldn’t give to have written a hexalogy, just to be able to use that word on the regular) and throughout Manning has afforded me many invaluable lessons, both as a reader and a writer, and I’m sure there are many still yet to come. She’s a taut spare writer; her terseness speaks to my own style, her ability to render complexity simply is something I long to master.

I’m one of those writers who reads while they write; I don’t suffer from the trepidation that my reading will somehow overwhelm my voice or vision. In all honesty I want my reading to influence my writing. Fiction requires so much to make it sing — it is the art of a thousand tasks — and if you’re like me, if you’re not one of those books-every-two-years writers, you’ll take any and all help.

For me, my most reliable adjunct is my reading. My reading not only inspires me, rekindles that love that brought me to the page, but also often reminds me of some vital element I’m leaving out of my own work that the writing itself does not always reveal.

So as some of you know I’ve been writing this Gilgamek novel and on the main it’s been a pretty good experience. I’ve discovered some strengths I never thought I had, and discovered some rather surprising weaknesses. Por ejemplo, I realized in this long process that my Character descriptions tend to be on the weak side. In fact I calculate that I’ve rewritten my central Characters’ intro descriptions at least a dozen times each.

That’s a lot even for me. I’ve done Character descriptions in my fiction before — this ain’t my first rodeo — and yet in this novel I just wasn’t hitting and couldn’t understand what I was getting wrong.

And then I read the following description in book four of Manning’s hexalogy, The Danger Tree.

Her hair, brown in its depths, golden where it had caught the sun, hid most of her face and her bath robe, of white towelling that enhanced the warm shade of her skin, hid her body except for the arm and the rising curve of her breast, yet the impression she gave was one of extraordinary beauty. He could scarcely find breath to say, ‘My name’s Simon Boulderstone. I’m Hugo’s brother.’

This is the first time we meet Edwina Little, one of the novel’s significant figures, and you will notice Manning’s portraitist gift — her evocative economy, her gemcutter’s precision. But this paragraph also provided me with exactly what I’d been looking for: a masterclass of how to do my Character descriptions right.

(I ended up flipping back through the first trilogy and discovered that nearly all her key Character descriptions share most of the elements woven into this Character description.)

Here’s how I broke it down (because of course I have to break everything down in order to understand it):

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As writers we seek to create characters and worlds that have the presence, the authority of what is real, of what is. This is a formidable task that we can make easier by selecting materials or deploying techniques that are themselves convincing.

One such technique that has helped me always is a Character’s River. In Texas Hold’em, the River is the last card flipped over, the one that determines the hand. If we imagine people (and by extension Characters) as a hand in poker, we all have cards beyond our face cards, beyond what’s easily discernible to others. Sides of ourselves that are revealed only under pressure or when our carefully curated self-assemblage slips. These River reveals are not just memorable (and often, at the interpersonal level, decisive), they are important tools for selling our Characters in fiction, for appropriating the presence of the real.

You will recall Maya Angelou’s famous exhortation When someone shows you who they are, believe them.

Wise words for life and for writing. To create believable Characters, organize instances where your Characters show us who they really are — in other words, create a Character River. Reveal a side of them that would not be otherwise accessible to a reader.

Often this River side contrasts with their outward demeanor, with their face cards, alludes to their inner contradictions. Sometimes the River reveals that the surface-self is in fact deep — is in fact, character.

Perhaps one the most famous Rivers in nerd canon is Frodo’s startling reaction when confronted with the danger that Gollum has put him and the entire Shire in:

‘But this is terrible!’ cried Frodo. ‘Far worse than the worst that I imagined from your hints and warnings. O Gandalf, best of friends, what am I to do? For now I am really afraid. What am I to do? What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!’

Hitherto Frodo has presented himself “as nice a young hobbit as you could wish to meet”. But when his life is in peril Frodo lets slip a ruthless inhuman aspect, a River reveal that will over the course of three volumes determine the fate of the world.

And then there’s Pilate’s final words at the end of Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Pilate has just been shot by Guitar (the bullet was meant for Milkman) and you would think as she lays dying in Milkman’s arms she would rage at the injustice but no; she says instead:

“I wish I’d a knowed more people, I would of loved ‘em all. If I’d known more, I would a loved more.”

And here at the end of her life we see who Pilate was all along, and an already convincing portrait becomes imbued with the presence and authority of the real.

Third example (sans spoilers): I recently watched Curry Barker’s wild film Obsession. The protagonist Bear spends the opening quarter of the film agonizing over revealing his “love” for his friend Nikki. And then Nikki asks him point-blank if he’s into her and his response, a River if I’ve ever seen one, exposes an aspect of Bear that haunts the rest of the film.

You got a Character you want readers to cleave to — to feel in their marrow and hearts and dreams?

Stage a River. Make it surprising, low key or high key.

Back in graduate school I left a generous tip at a restaurant and as I was leaving I saw the woman I was dating at the time steal the tip. This really happened, in Ithaca, at Plums. I didn’t say anything. I walked half a block with her and then pretended I’d left something at the restaurant and went back and left another tip.

What happened next doesn’t matter. What matters is that when I design Characters I’m always looking for Rivers that equal the unnerving truth-effect of that surprising reveal.

There are peculiar challenges to writing long — when you spend months, sometimes years with your Characters. I cannot speak for anyone else but each time I’ve written novels (one published, one in progress, five or six in ruins) I’ve found myself susceptible to what I call Character Lock — when I achieve a good-enough version of my protagonist / protagonists and I write the book around that fixed vision, instead of letting the characters evolve through the process. Sure, there might be a little movement throughout, a few surprises in the Character’s approaches to the obstacles my imagination throws at them, standard drift, but more often than not when I lapse into Character Lock the protagonist I start with on Day 1 will be roughly the same mangazón I’m pursuing on Day 365. An arrested character trapped in the initial amber of their conception.

If one is alert to Character Lock, one will end up encountering quite a few otherwise awesome published books whose protagonists suffer from this condition — where the protagonist is both sufficiently complex but static. Good enough for their novel, I guess, but too static for the Illusion of Life that I seek. What I’ve also noticed is that my absolute favorite novels don’t suffer from Character Lock and not only at the obvious diegetic level but in subtle molecular ways that are often hard to put a finger on in the text, but that help imbue the Character with that much desired state of lividity.

See that’s the rub: as a writer you can build Character growth straight into the superstructure of your Story — Protagonist X is dumped by the other corners of their magic hunting triad, eventually learns humility but realizes they will struggle to overcome the inner guardedness that got them in the situation in the first place — which is cool and necessary and helps hold off the static fail, but which also can sometimes feel as though you have a Character who is like a plank of nicely textured wood (complex but static). When the structured change of the Conflict hits, the Character changes, sure, but they change like a nicely textured piece of wood changes when it is split. Sure, the Character has altered but the sense of inhuman stiffness before and after the change remains.

But what if you’re seeking to imbue your characters with a looseness, a fluidity, a life-ness, an animation that expresses an already present microscopic lividity? Life, as Octavia Butler teaches us, is change — so when the structured change of the Conflict hits, you feel the Character is not a piece of complex but static wood upon whom an alteration has been wrought, but instead a living being who has absorbed one of “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”

A lifeness that is almost never identified by its presence, but almost always by its absence, apophatically.

Or perhaps this is too weird and too ephemeral an aspiration – what if you seek to keep your Protagonist reading as a real person throughout the long process of writing a novel or a durational work of fiction?

How I cope with these challenges is that I like stay searching for my Characters throughout the entire process of writing. Which is to say: I’m always looking to understand my Characters in excess of the Story I’m writing. And therefore I work on my Characters in parallel ways, details that rarely make it into the Story, but whose awareness informs the Story in powerfully subtle ways.

I’ve touched on this before, but put simply: I learn more about my Character than the Story needs, a knowledge that nevertheless cannot help but to imbue my characterization with a hard-to-pin-down lividity or lifeness.

(It is in this characterlogical excess that my characters most often come to life.)

One exercise that has produced sweetly for me on this front is what I call the Unpopularity Principle.

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Dialogue is one of the key channels of intrinsic characterization, along with interiority and praxis. What a character says, what a character thinks, what a character does — lock in on those three channels and you’ll be halfway up the mountain that is compelling convincing Character. Give the Character two other relationships (the extrinsic component) and you’ll have the summit in sight.

Because your average person lives in the world where there is a lot of “dialogue” (people jawing) and consumes media oversaturated with “dialogue” — TV, films, videos, music, theater — said average people tend to have strong opinions as to what constitutes good dialogue and what doesn’t. (Most folks, for example, don’t have nearly as much experience with Third person narration.) This is why dialogue is always something for the writer to keep their art on, to worry over.

You’ve heard the old saying kill your darlings — well, one should be extra terminator with their dialogue. Doesn’t matter whether you prefer your dialogue verbose, terse, or some gradation in between. Whatever your baseline prolixity preferences, always triple check whether a line of dialogue deserves its seat at the table, because folks will notice weak dialogue the way they won’t a weak line of exposition.

Most of you will know the standard rules of good dialogue.

Good Dialogue is conflict — if you ain’t using your Dialogue for Character combat, subtle or salient, remote or immediate, you might wish to ask why.

Good Dialogue has a telos or point — characters want something — whether it’s recognition, sympathy, obedience, persuasion or something material — and pursue said something through the dialogue. Good Dialogue is, in other words, building towards something.

Good Dialogue reveals Character — absolutely, should be the first rule. Especially when you put Dialogue — what a Characters says — into producing tension with what they’re thinking and what they’re doing.

Good Dialogue doesn’t perform the Writer’s work — doesn’t spend even a vowel explaining or setting up narrative points for the writer — good dialogue performs the Character’s work.

Good Dialogue adds — doesn’t just repeat or rhyme material, information the reader has heard before. Good Dialogue adds to the diegesis, to our knowledge of the World, the Conflict, the Characters. Some folks say that good Dialogue should surprise but in my experience I’m lucky to have a surprising bit of Dialogue once a story. I suspect, though, when they say Surprise they might mean this: adding. In good dialogue, information ain’t always necessarily surprising, but it is always dynamic.

Good Dialogue ain’t real talk — it just passes for real talk. It’s not enough, in other words, to study Dialogue in the real world (though you should); you need to study Dialogue inside of other narrative mediums to see what’s been done before and how.

On top of those I have my own warnings and suggestions:

Good Dialogue is dear — in real life talk is cheap but in fiction talk is dear. Bad dialogue can wreck a story quicker than a few bad lines of description.

Good Dialogue rebels — beyond essential — this is often the difference between convincing dialogue as a unit and everything else — sure you can jewel your individual lines of Dialogue to perfection but the entire dialogue system will be off, will strike readers as tendentious and collusory if the writer fails to introduce other voices other tenors other rhythms other opinions that countermand the tyranny of the authorial voice. The authorial voice is cool, restrained, civilized — we need to hear Orc voices — that way you are building the Illusion of Life.

Good Dialogue should be overheard — should strike as something overhead and not written / scheduled. This is more a general aesthetic goad than anything but it often helps when in the re-writing phase.

And finally Good Dialogue springs from a secret need — when designing principal Characters I like to include information that guides their utterances. For each significant Character I ask a simple characterlogical question: What is the single overriding outcome they seek to avoid whenever they are speaking?

For one Character the Need might be seeming, well, needy. For another Character it is being factually wrong. For another Character it is not seeming smart (which is very different from seeming dumb). Whatever you decide will be a part of the Character and, for me at least, shows up in the Story. I design this characteristic explicitly to be diegetically nonactionable. It’s a hidden mechanism for generating consistent interesting Dialogue.

(I’ve tried the opposite — to ask my Characters what is the one outcome they wish to achieve — but it did not work as well.)

I picture the Character’s Need as a submerged stone in the Character’s communication river. Invisible, and yet subtly (or profoundly) altering the flow of the communications.

Occasionally I am told by people that I write good Dialogue. Not exactly true, but any credit on this front belongs to this final trick, which if nothing gives me consistency and a compass to guide me while writing Dialogue and an intimacy with my Character I might not have otherwise had.

Nothing, after all, keeps you close to a Character like protecting their secrets.

One of my favorite character exercises as a writer (and an exercise I would suggest to anyone who wishes to leave an autobiographical legacy for their children or loved ones) is to imagine my characters apophatically — to imagine my character through negation, through who they didn’t become.

In other words: I write a page from the point of view of my character, titled Why I Didn’t Become ____.

Nothing helps me understand my characters like exploring the other person they might have become had they taken another path, made another choice.

You’d be amazed how much more deeply one can come to know a person not by who they are but by who they aren’t.

And the Why behind these Whos.

If I were to do this for myself, autobiographically, I would write a page on Why I Didn’t Became an Island Dominican and tell the story of how and why my attempt to live in the DR as an adult came to grief.

I wrote one about my current protagonist Gilgamek entitled Why I Didn’t Become a Student, about the difficult (and possibly wrong-headed) choice he made to leave his early schooling in spite of the encouragement of his best friend Feckles.

I scrupulously avoid ending these exercises with But Fortunately I Became X because I want to keep the focus sharply on what the character might have been, on the significant personal choices they made in reaction to their circumstances that put their lives on a dramatically different course.

Significant and personal are as important as they Why here.

The more poignant you make what your characters Didn’t Become the more insightful it will be to you as a writer, the more it will enhance your understanding of your characters and help you create an invisible architecture for the way they will react in your story. Same way if you leave one of these messages for a loved one — the more significant and personal what wasn’t chosen is, the more meaningful and insightful it will be to the one receiving it.

(I actually made a few of these in video form to be shared with friends and family … when the time comes.)

Anyway, give it a shot. I promise it will help your characters, and perhaps if you do a few about yourself even your loved ones.

This exercise is, of course, inspired by Tracey Emin’s devastating short video Why I Never Became a Dancer, an extraordinary work of art that as someone who survived much has inspired and held me for decades.

I’m always searching for signs of Character. When I’m writing, when I’m reading, when I’m journaling, when I’m watching TV/movies, when I’m noticing or interacting with people out in the wild, strangers, friends, family — I’m always trying to make sense of this narrative technology we call Character. How best to understand Character. How best to write them.

Because I’m a writer, because I’m from a big family, because like most folks I often find people fascinatingly incomprehensible.

On Saturday I was in my favorite museum in Tokyo, the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, checking out one of my favorite art shows: the annual Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions. Fameme had a Durian piece, and appended to it was a profile written by Yi-Hsun Florence Huang. At the bottom of one of those pages I found these words:

“...to write characters three-dimensionally, one must look at the shadows behind them.”

Because of course. This tracks with my belief that organizing a character around their Silences is a powerful method for creating consistency, depth, and meaning beyond what’s readily available on the page. Though perhaps one should take care to insure that your Character’s Silences contain within them that which haunts the Character.

On my daily walk the next day — taking a long lazy curve through Nakameguro to Gakugei — I stopped at Streamers which was in full gaijin mode. While waiting for my coffee I overheard someone talking in English to a friend about the difference between personality and character. I ear-hustled for a few seconds, and then catching myself, got back to my amble.

The Personality / Cáracter dialectic is one of those dichotomies I’ve always loved thinking about, and a dichotomy I’ve found super-useful for understanding and, more instrumentally, for constructing Characters.

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I’m working on this YA novel — which I’m serializing here — and one thing I’ve been trying to come to grips with is how my protagonist changes or doesn’t change as he’s worked over by the Story’s various Conflicts.

We all know: Conflicts catalyze our Stories and help dramatize our Characters — when done right Conflicts incite our Character to make choices that keep our Characters alive and dynamic in the imagination of our readers. By having characters respond meaningfully to conflict, by giving characters convincing Conflict-induced choices, the writer sells the world and characters to the reader as real.

To repeat: Conflict affords characters opportunities to perform their character and through their choices to deepen a reader’s understanding of who they are. Sometimes what is revealed about the characters through these performance / choices is obvious and helps to delineate what is most salient about the character. For example: those scenes in any Batman story where Batman is being prototypically Batman (a bad-ass vigilante).

Sometimes what is revealed about the Character through their performances / choice is less obvious. For example those moments in the best Batman stories where Batman expresses unusual depths: a more subtle tormented self-aware sympathetic side. One is reminded of the moment at the end of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns issue two.

Good Conflict forces Characters to make choices — choices that reveal the character to the reader by their choices.

These are reader-facing reveals.

But there is another type of reveal that often occurs if your story is going long or deep (or both).

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When it comes to creating our characters, we can never have enough tool-paradigms, enough structuring heuristics. It’s just the nature of our game. One tool-paradigm can be useful for understanding / assembling one sort of character in one type of story, and yet be utterly useless for understanding / assembling another type of character in another sort of story. As we build our craft repertoires we must always remember that we are best served by an abundance of approaches. Whether we’re talking character, conflict, context, voice, or mood, abundance must reign within in order for generativity to flow without.

In that spirit, here's another approach for building convincing, compelling characters.

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When I’m writing my stories and sketching out the relationships between characters I often write down the lines of dialogue that if delivered by Character A would most thoroughly undo Character B. Almost always these lines of dialogue — and the people who could utter them — don’t appear in the stories, but spelling these out helps me understand the relationships and the characters, helps me understand the silences and subterranean tensions that hold my characters together / apart.

Often these lines of unraveling, these Avada Kedavra, even if spoken, won’t hit characters until long after the story is over, years later. I call these delayed impacts overnight mail. I like it when a character has overnight mail because it automatically gives them a future, and when a character has a future it’s a lot easier to write them dynamically. Even if we don’t actually see the character change drastically the fact that there is a change pendiente often lends the character a dynamic vibration.

Or so I hope.

With some characters there’s nothing anyone can say that will get through to them — so dense and unassailable are their defenses — and that’s important information to have, as well.

Sometimes I try to conceive what my characters wish would be said to them — though usually that only comes into focus after I’ve finished the story — something discovered in the consummation and not before.

Another equally useful technic is writing down what you characters think their redlines are —what actions they don’t think they would ever tolerate — versus what their actual redlines are.

We humans are a mystery to ourselves. As a writer we have to synthesize that mystery — that darkness that comes before — and the best way I’ve figured out to accomplish this strange demiurgicity is to ask characters questions that serve first and foremost the character and not necessarily the story at hand.

We may be unknowable but it is the task of the writer to render their characters’ unknowability while simultaneously making them worth knowing.

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Unless you’ve written something very obvious, your characters won’t usually start out the narrative with a full understanding of the story’s Conflict.  After all, one of fiction’s most reliable “gambits” is to have protagonists assume the Conflict is one thing only to discover by story’s end that it’s quite another.  

Part of the fun of traditional stories is how conflicts tend to reveal themselves to the protagonist (and by extension the reader) in stages.  I like to imagine Conflicts like a card game with one card face-up and one (or two or three or four) cards face down.  As the story progresses the Conflict will begin flipping its cards, revealing its real nature, until the full scope of the Conflict is laid bare at story’s end.  Whether the protagonist at whom the Conflict is directed wishes to grasp that full scope is another matter altogether. 

The fact that Conflicts tend to start one way and end another way is important to remember when we’re designing our characters’ Stakes.    

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When we write a character well we are creating belief in that character. 

(I prefer Tolkien’s creation of belief over Coleridge’s suspension of disbelief for the simple reason that in my book creativity is a positive act of bringing something into the world and not a negation of a negative.) 

Well-written characters possess real-seeming-ness or what the Disney folks call the illusion of life; they are narrative replicants that ignite our sympathies and excite our genius for limbic connection.  They are fakeries that live inside of us with a truth that seems real.

We’ve discussed a number of strategies that will help infuse the illusion of life into your characters; we’ve spoken of the Five Secret Channels and how Wants are a wonderful primary for character creation — same with Silences and the Three-Body Problem.  Characters don’t necessarily need all these qualities to achieve life-like-ness — just enough of them.  Your story will guide you in selecting which ones you will most need, but nevertheless having a solid panoply at your disposal will always help, not only to dress the story at hand but also to improve your character creation skills in general.

You want another surefire way of creating convincing compelling characters?

Give them Troubles. 

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By Troubles I don’t mean the resistance that arises from our character’s Wants, and I don’t mean the story-structuring trials that Conflict imposes on your protagonists. 

Troubles, in my homebrew, are a fully lower level of narrative friction, a category of antagonism that can produce smoke but not fire, worthy of an anecdote but not a full story.  They are the lesser conflicts, everyday annoyances, minor inconveniences that bother all our lives and should bother the lives of your protagonists.  The anxious dog, the dodgy knee, the broken glasses, the bureaucratic tangle, the suspicious drycleaner, the bus that the character keeps missing, the bad haircut, the noisy AC next door — everyone has Troubles — unless of course you’re some perfect God-type, and who the fuck wants to read about someone like this? 

Mechanically speaking: Wants shape the character; Conflict shapes the Story and the character’s progress through the Story.  Troubles, on the other hand, add texture to the character and their world but don’t really impact the Story.  Significantly: characters tend not to have the time or the space to respond to their Troubles meaningfully.  Troubles, after all, are Troubles; they are not Conflicts.   

Sometimes a character’s Troubles are on the bigger side: the Dursleys, for example, before they start trying to owl-block Harry Potter.  Sometimes the Troubles are low-key, like Luke Skywalker being forced to clean up droids when all he wants is to go to Toshi Station to pick up power converters, or Sarah Connor from The Terminator who has a crappy job or Katniss with that damn cat she didn’t drown.  

Any of these Troubles, in the hand of another writer, could have easily been the story’s central Conflict, but because Lucas and Rowling and Cameron chose to center other wilder Conflicts, they aren’t. 

All a matter of degree, and what the writer chooses to shape their story with — versus what they use to add low-key reality to their characters. 

A sprained foot that has no real impact on the drama — Trouble.

A sprained foot the day before the big game the character secretly bet on — Conflict.

I love Troubles; they give a writer so much for so little.  Troubles are something all people can relate to — not everyone has siblings or best friends but everyone, and I mean everyone, has Troubles. Troubles are part of the human condition and will make your characters more human-esque as well, more real, more sympathetic.

Any surprise that all the best characters, in literature, on screen, have Troubles?

Best of all each person’s Troubles are as unique as their fingerprints or their family, making them an excellent way to individuate your characters—by the Troubles themselves and how the character chooses to react to them.

Troubles can signal Consequentiality, and if you choose a physical Trouble they can keep the character’s Body in play (always important).  Plus, if the Trouble has been cooking awhile, said Trouble will impart three-dimensionality to a character, will help sell the sense that a character (through their Trouble) was “alive” before the story begins and will “live” on after the story ends. 

Troubles will also help you illuminate your character’s world — in a low-key, almost subliminal way.  Different worlds will naturally have different Troubles. After all, there are some characters who live in worlds where everyone has debt and some characters who lived in worlds where no one has debt. Some characters whose worlds are full of infrastructural wildness and others whose worlds are seamless.

Show me a character’s Troubles (and how they react to them) and I will show you who they are and where they are.

How much Trouble do you need?  Depends on the story and on the character.  Some stories require you to pile on the Troubles.  Other stories only need one annoying bit of shittery to sell the characters and their world.    

Let your own experience and your reading guide you. 

Me, I like to select Troubles that are persistent, that predate and will outlast the story.

I keep Troubles humming through my stories like a heartbeat, like a drum.  I couldn’t tell my stories any other way.

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We’ve explored a number of strategies for writing compelling, convincing characters.  As storytellers, we need as many of these as we can gather — the more tools, the more lenses, the more approaches the better.

Here’s another: 

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If you’re an editor or a creative writing instructor you run into this one on the regular.  I received a good example a few weeks ago from a student, who had written what was otherwise a very solid story.  There was a compelling conflict with tightly-wrought scenes, the world and the secondary characters were well-drawn and believable — but the story’s protagonist was off.  Which was strange. On paper the protagonist seemed to be the perfect person for this particular story, and as the narrative focal point they did a commendable job reporting on everything happening around them, a commendable job evoking the storyworld.

What was missing, paradoxically enough, was the protagonist themselves.  I mean, the protagonist was there in every scene, reporting tirelessly on the world and the other characters. Delivered a faithful blow-by-blow account of what was happening around them, with maybe a little color commentary to go with it and yet despite the considerable amount of narrative work the protagonist was doing, all the words they were expending on the world outside, they never once said a word about themselves, never delved into themselves as characters.

Which meant the protagonist was present but also, fundamentally, not present.

(These types of protagonists are also too present in another sense of the word—seemed permanently stuck in the present tense, with no memories of the past, no longings or plan for the future.) 

Which meant they never truly came into focus as characters, never gave us readers anything to connect with. 

They were all narration, with little to no characterization. All present-case but no self.

Normally you’d fix this problem by filling up the character — adding a want or a contradiction or friends, or one of the Invincible Channels — but weirdly enough the protagonist’s lack of character seemed profoundly structural, extending beyond the character themselves.  Something deep was at work here that was jamming the character’s character-ness. 

So what was happening? 

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Before I got to university I didn’t have a lot of models for writing race, much less understanding it.  No real ones.  My family did race all day long in the typical fucked-up Caribbean campesino sort of way, but they didn’t talk about it. 

They weren’t alone on this front, either.  No one around me talked race, not in critically audible way that would help me understand it, that would clarify.  Not the news, not my friends or neighbors, not the books I had access to, not my teachers.  In those days diverse books weren’t a thing at all, and not once did anyone ever recommend I read something that might resonate with my identity, that might illuminate who I was.  As a poor Afro-liminal Dominican kid growing up in Central Jersey in the 70s and 80s, I experienced racist hate and racial confusion and racial silences but not a drop of racial understanding. 

No mentors, no mirrors, no insight. 

Just gaps and erasures, evasions and distortions, and a whole lot of white supremacy that agonized me but whose strictures I swallowed without question. 

I lived race in the dominant mode without the minimal understanding.  The rare moments of resistance, the inner perturbances, the resistant glitches — quickly smoothed over, anesthetized.  I was stuck in the sunken place, in the Matrix with no red pill in sight.  Nightmare doesn’t begin to cover it.  Under those conditions, no chance I could comprehend the reality of America or my family or my own self, much less write about it. 

MUTANT METAPHOR

What I did have, though, were the X-Men. 

Yes, the comic books.

I began reading the X-Men in 1977, just as the legendary Claremont-Byrne run was kicking off, picking issues off the spinners at Kresge and I doubt you have patience or I the space to fully expand upon how batshit I went for the Marvel Mutants.  I was at the right age for the hunted hated X-Men and their awesome melodramas — in the right place for Professor X, Storm, Wolverine, Cyclops, Phoenix, Nightcrawler (bampf!) — and, in issue 129, Kitty Pride.  In those long-ago days I loved me some X-Men with a fremen fervor, loved their powers, their contretemps, their delirious operatic lives, the villains (Brotherhood of Evil Mutants and Hellfire Club forever) but when all is said and done what I really resonated with, what made this particular pop object utterly indispensable for me, was the mutant metaphor at the heart of the X-Men: unlike the vanilla superheroes of old, the X-Men depicted a world where a mutant’s superpower (the expression of their X-gene) transformed “normal” people into a despised, discriminated, physically other minority. 

In effect, the X-Men’s mutancy othered these heroes in metaphorically powerful ways, but chief among these alterities was the obvious racial allegory. 

A racial allegory made marvelous and majestic — and inescapable — by the central presence of Ororo Munroe, aka Storm.  One of the first major black characters and major female black characters in comics, Storm, along with Wolverine, were the X-Men for me in those days. 

Some books, like some songs or dances or movies or meals, change us.  The X-Men definitely changed me, acting like an X-gene, triggering the long anfractuous process of my Fanonian awakening.  The X-Men were both a mirror and a window into my own experience as a poor immigrant person of African descent in Central New Jersey, and like anyone who is starved for something that I’d been long denied, I battened onto the X-Men like my life depended on it — because in a way it did. 

The X-Men were the first books that got me thinking about race in a critical way (we take what we can get) and more to the point got me thinking about doing race at a representational level.  After all, one of the essential dramatic components of the mutant metaphor was that all the best X-Men had ambivalent relationships to their alterity, to their mutancy, to their otherness.  They, in other words, had a relationship to their race and that was something that I had never imagined before, that blew my fucking mind because it made me understand that I too had a relationship with my otherness, one that had been previously naturalized to the point of invisibility. 

That was an X-lesson I didn’t have to wait to become a writer to internalize or to put into practice.  In those pre-writing days, I was roleplaying nonstop and my group had a special love for superhero games (Champions, Villains and Vigilantes, DC Heroes), and as the gamemaster I had to create countless superpowered NPCs for the players to interact with, and because of what I learned from the X-Men I always wrote out for each of my home-brew Mutant characters, not only their stats and their powers, but also how they felt about their superpowers. 

This was the First Order Racial Relationship.

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When it comes to writing characters of color poorly, here’s something that never seems to go out of style: characters of color who are defined by racism — characters who appear in a text only to be victimized by racism or when racism (against them or other people of color) needs to be spectacularized — characters whose suffering and abjection is, in essence, their character. 

To call these types of representations popular is to say poco. These shits are everywhere — all over our movies, our tv shows, our books, our ephemera, and you better believe they are all over our drafts. I know of what I speak — all through my early years these white gaze characters is all I seemed to write.

No surprise, really. What the dominant culture loves, the dominant culture gets. And there is nothing, and I mean nothing, the dominant culture loves more than gorging itself on an endless torrent of our suffering.

RACE-MATIZED

You heard me talk about race reduced characters in my previous post.  Reducing a character to their race-ethnicity is a lot of no-fun things: bad writing, symbolic violence, a straight-up lie.  This type of writing is also, unsurprisingly, far too common among writers of all colors.  Even when I taught workshops exclusively for writers of color the race reduced characters cropped up with stubborn frequency, became part of our mission to usher them gently off-stage. (There’s an argument to be made that the history of writers of color is in no small part a history of our struggle to write ourselves free from hegemony’s two-dimensional mendacities, into the fullness of our multiversal humanity.)

Now, race reduced characters are one thing — but characters who have been reduced to racism, characters who have been racismatized, are another level of wildness altogether.

Racismatized characters partake in all the bullshit of race reduced characters but dial it up a notch (or three).  Race is a conceptual field that contains a lot of contradictory materials — not all of it obviously dangerous or pejorative.  Some of its reductive fantasies will seem quite attractive to the uninitiated.  Group X is hot or smart, for example. 

Racism flattens all that confused material down to a weaponized edge.  Race, after all, can engage fantasies about desire, athleticism, intelligence — but racism, as Ruthie Gilmore argues, “entails, fundamentally, the question of who is placed in closest proximity to violence and death.” 

Racismization transforms your regular shmegular characters into avatars of white supremacy’s compulsive need to place us “in closest proximity to violence and death.” Racismatized characters always gesture to violence against, and destruction of, people of color. 

The fact that this shit is common distressed me when I was writing them in bulk, and distresses me now, when I don’t.

Does their ubiquity surprise me?

Not really.

Hegemony wouldn’t be hegemony if it didn’t get us, its victims, to do its work for it.   

WHAT I’M NOT SAYING

I’m not saying that a writer can’t bear witness to racism’s crimes, can’t write a character who has suffered enormously from racism or write a book centered on racism.  

In a world so imperiled by what bell hooks calls ‘imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,’ how can we not, in passing or with main force, confront that hideous monstrosity that works endlessly to be our doom? 

(Babylon, after all, is only going to fall when we chant it down.)

Having a character who’s suffered racism is one thing. The problem is when your character is solely or overwhelmingly defined by racism, when your character is denied their Baldwinian complexity, which people of color have to fight fiercely to preserve for ourselves — then you’ve aligned your art with the very forces that slobber for our destruction.  

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RACISMIZATION

Racismization, for lack of a better term, produces all manner of morbid symptoms in writers and readers.  For the sake of ease and clarity let’s spell out a few — clearly not all apply to every case, etc.

MORBID SYMPTOM A     as I mentioned, racismization is an act of symbolic violence that robs characters of color of their full Baldwinian humanity, flattening them into white supremacy-approved wafers, and also ever-so-subtly invites violence towards people of color.     

MORBID SYMPTOM B     racismization unfairly burdens characters of color with the “problem of race”. In hegemonic narratives white protagonist characters are allowed to enjoy an infinite variety of stories, but they are rarely forced to becomes avatars of racism (which is the supreme irony as racism is of one whiteness’ most reliable effluvia).  No such luck for protagonists of color in hegemonic narratives. 

MORBID SYMPTOM C     racist spectacles are almost always organized around white supremacist desires (the rarely repressed desire to enact harm on colored bodies and psyches) which often comes with a side shot of disavowal that allows the viewer / reader to enjoy violent acts against imagined colored bodies while simultaneously deploring these horrifying acts. 

MORBID SYMPTOM D     the obsessive focus on despicable individual acts of racism often helps to focus attention away from the hegemonic systems of oppression.

MORBID SYMPTOM E     by linking people of color to racism, racismization keeps people of color closely associated to crime.  If orthodox white supremacy imagines people of color as always crimogenic, racismization is the liberal side of that logic.  In this case we might be victims of crimes but still somehow always in crime.  No matter the politics, these framings keep us forever bound in yellow police tape. 

MORBID SYMPTOM F an increased appetite for more of the same.

SETHE’S LAW

Good writers will avoid these trip-traps simply by writing characters that are Baldwinian complex and by hewing to what I call Sethe’s Law.  In Toni Morrison’s monumental Beloved, the protagonist Sethe is so traumatized by the inhumanities of enslavement and so heartbroken by what those inhumanities caused her to do (crawling already) that her character could easily have been a masterclass on the dangers of racismization.

Morrison, however, is our greatest writer for a reason; even as she sought to map-scar the mortal horrors of American chattel slavery onto Sethe’s back, she imbued Sethe with what I can only describe as a complete soul — a characterization profoundly authentic in its furious loneliness and its frozen vulnerability, a characterization that both acknowledged the infinity of harm Sethe suffered and denied it the final word.  

This is Sethe’s Law.

Sethe’s Law insists that the deeper the racial harm your character has suffered, the more profound their colored humanity must be.

Sethe’s Law insists that your character’s colored humanity (and not white supremacy) must always have the last word. 

THE TEST

How do you know your characters are honoring Sethe’s Law?

Easily:

Imagine removing all the racist / oppressive suffering from the character and their story.

Now ask yourself: does what remains of the character have enough depth and humanity to qualify as a three-dimensional real-seeming person — and carry the story?

If yes, you’re good.

If no, roll up your sleeves and put them to right.

(And you will have placed your hand on the great axle of our future.)

I WILL CALL THEM MY PEOPLE1

Roger Guenveur Smith famously asked Why does everyone love Black music but nobody loves Black people?  

In a similar vein one might ask Why does everyone love people of color suffering, but nobody loves people of color? 

We all know the answer, for it has its coils about us and is threatening to blood-funnel the world to death.

It is the task of the decolonial artist to insist on the disquieting complexity of our colored humanity — a humanity that will always exceed the endlessness of our historical anguish —

— and to call beloved who are not beloved.

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When constructing characters of color in a mimetic mode — i.e. in our real white supremacy-sotted world — I always like to understand:

—     what’s my character’s relationship to their racio-ethnic identity

—    whether or not their identity plays a determinative role in the story (which will be addressed in another post)

RELATIONSHIP

When it comes to my character’s relationship to their racial identity — which we will call their racial relationship for the purpose of this discussion — there are countless possibilities to draw from.  

Usually, a writer’s own racial relationship is a good source of inspiration — followed by family and friends.  In my own family, for example, there are at least a dozen different racial relationships for me to extrapolate from. 

Some of these racial relationships will be cool, some hot, some distant and aloof, others personal and close.  And while there are always racial relationships that are outre as fuck, radioactive with trauma, extremity, and dysregulation, it is vital to keep in mind that the preponderance will be mundane and undistinguished to the point of trope-ishness because, in truth, many of us have racial relationships that are mundane and undistinguished.  

Worth remembering our relationships with our racial identity are dynamic sites of negotiation and struggle; and ways of seeing / doing the world; and sources of knowledge, resistance, creativity, community, love. Doesn’t mean your character’s relationships will resonate with all that complexity but just, you know, FYI.

FACES OF RACE

When I’m cooking up my protagonist characters I often like to complicate their racial relationship by giving it two faces: an internal face and an external face.  A side they show to the world, and a side they hold to themselves.  Which, at least in my experience, more accurately represents how those of us who are raced experience that reality, from without and within.   

Sometimes these faces agree; sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they are in a permanent détente despite their obvious contradictions, and sometimes they are in a permanent machete duel in spite of their similarities. 

When a racial relationship’s internal face emerges, becomes public, that is often a rich source of drama, character, and conflict. 

EXPRESSION

Remember, just because a character has a racial relationship doesn’t mean that relationship will dominate the story; you don’t even have to represent the relationship on the page at all if that’s your bag, though I figure if you go through the process of creating a racial relationship for your character you might as well express it somewhere in the narrative. In many of my stories the character’s racial relationship manifests as a token or small flourish, but you might be surprised how resonant and telling these inferential traces can be.

A SHORT LIST OF RACIAL RELATIONSHIPS

For your consideration:

— characters who never think about their racial identity at all — it’s either a source of avoidance, or thought to be completely irrelevant, or completely naturalized, or simply a comfortable given. 

— characters who only consider their racial alterity when forced, and have some akido-like techniques of avoiding the issue even in the midst of full-blown racial crisis (a specialty in my family).

— characters who bluster confidently about racial politics all day long but who in their own deeper thoughts are more ambivalent or troubled. 

— similarly characters who profess external nuance but harbor all sorts of inner stringencies.

— characters who are troubled by or ambivalent about their racial identities (or at least some of its features).

— and other characters who are quite pleased with their racial identities to the point of treating them like a valued possession.

— characters who are comfortable with their racial identities, but white supremacy’s endless bullshit has made them wary or flinty (a lot of Octavia Butler’s protagonists fall into this camp).

— characters whose racial relationships mobilize them to war against the racial order, either subtly or on some straight-up Killmonger shit.   

A Yunior Example: when I first pulled my narrator-protagonist Yunior together I assigned him a far richer, more satirically internal take on his racial identity (and racial politics in general) than he shows externally.  As a character organized around profound silences this additional aporia made sense. 

Again, the combinations are endless.  If you’re a person of color who grew up around people of color (or had a family of color) chances are you could sketch out twenty of these in a bandung minute.    

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It’s no surprise that many fiction writers choose to write in an autobiographical mode with protagonists that are alter egos of the closest kind.  For many of us, to write the self is to break generations of colonial silence; to defy with our work the malignant societal edicts that insist lives like ours do not matter, are unworthy of literature. 

At a strictly practical level, writing an autobiographical protagonist is enticing because nothing is more familiar to us than ourselves and because of the economies it offers —

A) the writer doesn’t have to create a fully-fledged character ex nihilo

and B) the writer can tap a deep well of self-knowledge to “flesh-out” and “sell” the character. 

Yet, in spite of these seeming efficiencies, writing autobiographical fiction or, more specifically, writing an autobiographical protagonist, is a riskier proposition than it might seem.  In the thirty-odd years I’ve worked with fiction writers up-close, I’ve observed that autobiographical protagonists do not seem to possess any special dispensation, suck as often, perhaps even more often, than completely fictional ones. 

There are no doubt many reasons why this might be so.  Perhaps the writers are too close or too respectful of the self-material to fictionalize it well — familiarity breeding a kind of dramatic dud-ness. 

But what I often find in my classes and workshops (and in some of my own writing) is that most of us writers protagonize ourselves without interrogating what exactly it is about ourselves that will make for interesting fiction — or what is worthy of protagonizing. 

Usually a variation of “because it’s me” will be the only reason offered — as close as creative writing comes to a genetic fallacy.

Chances are, though — unless you’re Sandra Cisneros brilliant — “because it’s me” will get a writer in trouble a lot quicker than it will get them published. 

I know this from personal experience, having spent years trying to write in an autobiographical vein and failing failing failing.    

It’s one of those ironies of fiction writing: writers who bang with “because it’s me” often pen autobiographical protagonists that are nowhere as interesting or as deep as the writer themselves.  How often have I read a manuscript and after I sat down with the writer wondered why the hell the writer sent their dullest fifth-generation-VHS-dupe-version of themselves to star in their story?       

How often have I written a manuscript, and afterwards wondered the same thing? 

It’s something I’ve reflected on a lot, and for anyone in a similar situation, here are a few thoughts and some possible solutions:

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He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. “You your best thing, Sethe. You are.” His holding fingers are holding hers. “Me? Me?”

—Beloved, Toni Morrison

What I’ve noticed about the fictional characters who I love and inspire me, and to whom I’m always turning when I write, is that their creators have given them Distinctions, qualities that are unique and set them apart, sui generis-nesses that in its best formulation will resonate with the story’s world and the conflict — in brief, the author gives these characters what Morrison’s Beloved would call their own best thing. 

Naturally, the kind of Distinction, how loud or subtle, instrumental or evasive, depends on the tale, genre, etc.  When you’re writing a traditional Superhero story or a Tolkien-derived epic fantasy, Distinctions tend to be on the Jovian side, compared to the Distinctions you might give a character residing in the neorealist literary fiction tradition. 

For my own work (and peace of mind), I divide Distinctions into four fuzzy sets. 

1               Distinctions based on what a character is

2               Distinctions based on what a character has done (in the past of the diegesis)

3               Distinctions based on what has been done to a character

4               Distinctions based what a character does (during the tale itself)

A few quick cases for clarity.

Let us consider Reacher, the protagonist of the Lee Child series, and now a monster hit on Amazon Prime. 

Reacher is physically massive, which is almost its own superpower — he is, in other words, distinct because of what he is. 

Reacher is a former Army MP and has all that training and resources — distinct because of what he has done. 

Reacher has left the Army — either because of downsizing or because he has been betrayed — distinct because of what has been done to him.

Reacher is a borderline psychopath (despite what television tells you, that level of easy violence ain’t normal, folks) but like all good Western heroes, Reacher channels his violence towards prosocial redemptive ends — a chivalric rarity (the novels tell us) in a society rotted through with neoliberal rapacity.  In other words, Reacher helps people by kicking insane amounts of ass — therefore Reacher is distinct because of what he does. 

Now let us consider Frodo Baggins, tragic hero of The Lord of the Rings. 

Frodo is a Hobbit and like most of his race is uniquely resistant to the malign power of the One Ring — distinct because of what he is. 

Frodo inherits the Ring because he is Bilbo’s heir — distinct because of what he is. 

Frodo has familiarized himself with the world outside the Shire, knows a little Elvish, has a wider-outlook and more generous sympathies than the average Hobbit — distinct because of what he has done. 

And in the novels, Frodo chooses not to harm Gollum in spite of his initial abhorrence, chooses to abandon the Fellowship in order to protect them and his mission from the Ring’s power — distinct because of what he does.

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And, finally, we turn to Sethe, the protagonist of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. 

Beloved is perhaps the most important and influential novel written in the English language, and as you might expect of such a book: Sethe’s distinctions are not as easy to discern as, say, Reacher’s — and yet they resonate — act upon — the diegesis with equal or perhaps greater force. 

Sethe’s Distinctions begin with her very existence.  As the novel informs us, Sethe’s mother spared her life because we assume she was her only child born freely, not from rape.  “The one from the crew she threw away on the island. The others from more whites she also threw away. Without names, she threw them. You she gave the name of the black man. She put her arms around him. The others she did not put her arms around. Never. Never. Telling you. I am telling you small girl Sethe." — Sethe is distinct because of what she is.

Sethe is also a former enslaved person — which in itself is no distinction from all the other former enslaved people in the novel, but it is a Distinction in a society where there is a generation that was not raised in slavery (Denver, for example), and where there are entire populations that were never enslaved — whites, for example.  Enslavement in this context is a collective Distinction — Sethe is distinct because of what was done to her. 

Sethe ran away from Sweet Home plantation and made it to the North, and most tragic of all when her former owners attempted to recapture her she attempted to kill her children in order to spare them from the infinity of suffering that was slavery, but only succeeded in slaying her youngest already-crawling daughter — Sethe is heroically and tragically distinct because of what she did. 

Sethe, afflicted by the constant labor of “keeping the past at bay,” afflicted by a scarred back that cannot feel (“chokeberry tree”), afflicted by the spiteful ghost of her slain crawling-already daughter, works through her hideous past with the help of Paul D and her daughters (Denver and Beloved) and at last feels “the hurt her back ought to”, trusts “things and remember things”, and with that connection and knowledge, Sethe opens the space within herself and her world so that the women of her community can help her exorcise the ghost of Beloved. 

“For Sethe it was as though the Clearing had come to her with all its heat and simmering leaves, where the voices of women searched for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words.  Building voice upon voice until they found it, and when they did it was a wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees. It broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its wash.”

Sethe is distinct because of what she does. 

A Distinction based on what a character is, what a character has done and has been done to them, can be finessed or wedged in by the writer.  A Distinction based on what a character does, on the other hand, must be earned in the story by the story, and is often what lingers most within a reader.

It is this final type of Distinction that a writer should work the hardest to realize — for it is by this Distinction that your characters will often be known and, in the best cases, remembered.

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There always seems to be a moment in my early drafts when my main characters feel close to coming alive.  They are well-made; they have a Want and all the Invincible Channels and a Three-Body Problem and I’ve made sure they are dynamic (change-rich) and are facing an interesting conflict. 

And yet, in spite of all my labors, there’s still something off, something missing.  They are, in the Frankenstein monster sort of way, the flesh without the lightning.  

They lack that galvanic spark that makes them seem real to a reader. 

There is much that can be wrong — fiction ain’t easy, has far many more moving pieces than might seem to a non-writer — but when I get to this stage in the game I always find myself thinking about my controlling immigrant parents. 

Strange leap but bear with me.

You see, I come out of a poor Dominican immigrant family that never got many breaks either in the US or DR, and all those centuries of bad luck and deprivation combined with the tribulations of immigrant life rendered my parents exceptionally demanding, exceptionally controlling, and exceptionally instrumental.  They ain’t the only people who I’ve seen this happen to and it ain’t only limited to immigrants — seems to be a common enough problem among parent types.  I’ve written three books trying to come to terms with fictional versions of my parental culture so I won’t go on too much here. 

What matters to this conversation is this: ours was not a household where the Follow-Your-Dream, Do-You-Boo philosophy prevailed.  In my family the Sword Logic of the Poor Immigrant ruled supreme and its expectations were as adamantine and irrefutable as a Commandment: all us kids were supposed to work to lift the family out of poverty — full stop.  Ours was a Basic program that went something like this:

10     Work

20     Go to 10

The way our parents had sacrificed themselves for the family, giving up their worlds and lives, we in turn were expected to sacrifice ourselves.  Frivolities and experimentation were discouraged (often violently).  Suggesting you wanted to be an artist was treated like a Thought Crime.  (We’re over here struggling to pay the rent and you want to write poetry?)  If you were a smart kid you had even more expectations.  You got into college?  Excellent, that meant you could help the family even more — but please major in something useful and try to graduate as soon as possible in order to help your family with the millions your college degree will surely earn you.

Our dreams were their dreams. We children were instruments of and for that dream. 

So what does all that have to do with characters who are not quite alive yet? 

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Well, writers, unless we are careful, are always at risk of becoming the controlling immigrant parents I’m talking about.  The very nature of our work means we often design our characters-conflicts-worlds with certain goals in mind, organized around a specific telos.  We especially create characters who will best serve the over-arching goal of the story or at least express the story’s complexities most fulsomely. 

A writer can’t help but be instrumental, but here’s the rub: if our writing is too instrumental — if our characters feel less like people and more like a cog or a conceit or a device, if they feel more like the extension of the writer’s will — then the instrumentality snuffs out the life-ness of the character. 

The same way a controlling immigrant parent can snuff out the lifebeat in the heart of a child. 

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Here’s what I do with my characters, especially after a draft or two.

I pull out a piece of paper and draw up two columns.  On the left, in the WRITER column (aka IMMIGRANT PARENT) I list all the things I expect out of my character in that particular story—all the shit I impose on them, all the shit they will endure. 

These are the writer’s Demands.  Even for an everyday story these lists tend to make for brutal reading.

Now in the other column, I list all the character’s aspects and interests that have absolutely nothing to do with the larger capital-S story I’m trying to inflict on them—nothing, in effect, to do with my needs as the writer.

This is a character’s LIBERTY. 

When you break it down in this way you become acutely aware of the mountains of suffering, humiliation and misfortunes that writers expect their characters to endure and how little they get in return.

Often our characters do not feel alive, do not work, because of this very imbalance, because they are all Demand and no Liberty.

They read as if they’ve been crafted by the most tyrannical of instrumentalist authors… or by the most controlling of immigrant parents.  When you write characters like these no part of them exists outside the exigencies of the writer’s story, no part of them that is frivolous or excessive or orthogonal, no part of them que no tiene interes. 

Without Liberty, a character lacks the fine-grain complexity of a real-seeming person.

Without Liberty, a character (very much like a real person) cannot truly live. 

Because isn’t that the nature of the world, of our mortal existence?  No matter what story we think we’re in, there’s always more to life or our world than that tale.  We could be in the midst of our worst tragedy and someone across the street will laugh uproariously.  We could be in the midst of a wildly comedic evening and one person in our party is sitting on the news that they’ve been fired from their dream job or that they’ve been dumped by their partners. Because that’s the way the world / life is—it exceeds us without fail.  We are all, in the end Horatios, and there are more things in heaven and Earth, than are dreamt of in any of our narratives or our controlling immigrant parents’ schemes.

Please note: characters don’t often need a lot of Liberty to seem real either. But they do need something.  

Consider Oscar de León, the protagonist of my novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.  My Demands on this poor palomo were relentless and extreme.  Everything from depression, obesity, friendlessness, extreme alienation, endless unrequited love, a suicide attempt, being nearly murdered, and then being actually murdered. 

The Liberty I provided him was small but potent: a lifelong love of SF and fantasy and roleplaying games that had no bearing on the plot or my authorial schemes whatsoever but that provided Oscar with a lot of joy and meaning and made his character real-seeming—a joy that ended up suffusing the whole text (an added bonus).    

In my homebrew the best kind of Liberty, whether it shows up big or small in the actual story, is one that a reader could easily imagine organizing a sequel story around.  To return to Oscar, I could have very easily written a novel centered on Oscar’s pursuit of the Great Dominican Fantasy Novel which is how you know you’ve given your character the right Liberty.  

Give your characters Liberty or they will not give you life.

And if you’re one of those immigrant children who is still struggling against your immigrant parent’s instrumentalities, remember: it only takes a little Liberty to create an entirely better story altogether, a sequel all your own.   

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