NEVER LET YOUR CONTROLLING IMMIGRANT PARENTS WRITE YOUR CHARACTERS; or LIBERTY

image from What We Do In the Shadows, from CBR.Com

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? 

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.