FUNDAMENTALS OF CHARACTER CREATION: CONTRADICTIONS
Nothing captures the essence of humanity quite like our contradictions. Whether it’s because we carry within ourselves multitudes that we cannot account for (much less reconcile) or because we cannot resist deceiving ourselves or because we’re too unavailable or because that’s just how humanity rolls, we are all contradictory, Whitmanesque beings.
Orson Wells had the right of it when he said Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. But if you are an immigrant, a person of color, a person of African descent or a woman or queer or disabled or a combination of these, you live between a lot more poles than two.
In a society like ours that has lately acquired an increased intolerance for contradiction, we cannot say it often enough: we are contradictions and contradictions are us. Contradictions are (to evoke Pullman’s The Golden Compass) our dæmons and what they reveal and reflect (whether at a personal or societal level) are our human imperfection, our human messiness, our human inconstancies, our human lack of awareness, our human genius for self-deception, our human cruelties, our endless human ambivalence —in sum, our fragile humanity. To live among human beings is to be exposed to an endless torrent of contradictions, many minor, and many that are wild as fuck.
The examples are endless:
--What we say versus what we do.
--Criticizing people for X even though we ourselves are the epitome of X.
--Complaining about our children’s screen addictions even as we ourselves fondle our smart phones more amorously than Gollum his ring.
--Treating people like shit without a single qualm but as soon as the shoe is on the other foot crying to the heavens about the unjust inhumanity of it.
--Asking people to cherish nature while simultaneously promoting a culture of monstrous consumption.
--Describing the US as the home of freedom and democracy despite the nation’s deep history of enslavement and genocide.
In real life one can easily glide over that churn of contradiction but literature (as Stendhal reminds us) is a mirror and invites us all to see what is hidden and disavowed. And among those many obscurities are always our contradictions.
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As writers of course we’re often told by instructors and blogposts that a reliable technique for creating compelling characters is to give them contradictions. This is one creative writing mainstay that I wholeheartedly agree with. Like Wants and Silences, like the Five Invincible Channels, contradictions help our fictional characters convince readers that they are human and not just textual replicants. A well-selected, well-written contradiction will help even our most replicant of characters pass the toughest of Voight-Kampff tests.1
Most writers will agree contradictions are great shorthand for imparting characters with a convincing humanity. But contradictions have other invaluable merits —both for our characters and our fiction, in general.
First off, contradictions are innately dramatic. A contradiction is a mini-drama all on its own. An extreme example: Anti-gay politician who likes to sleep with men. Contradictions are dialectics in search of synthesis. And fortunately for us writers, contradictions perform beautifully on the page. Shoot, contradictions take to the page the way extroverts take to the stage. I would go as far as saying that contradictions are one of fiction’s most singular affordances. Literature does contradiction better than any other medium. Fiction can swoop into a character’s firmly held beliefs, contrast this conviction with their contradictory habits, and then show the consequence of the contradiction and the blithe unawareness on the world and others, all in a page or two, without breaking a fucking sweat. Some writers only need a couple of paragraphs. What other media can compete with fiction’s effortless ability to represent both human contradiction, and the humanity our contradictions reveal?
Second, contradictions are irresistible. As one of my favorite authors Joan D. Vinge asserted: “… contradictions are what make human behavior so maddening and yet so fascinating, all at the same time.” David Berliner, one of our great contradictionists, is worth reading on this point: