ON WRITING CURVED CHARACTERS

Alter Ego by Florence Solis

We’ve been discussing the creation of compelling characters and in the process have been parsing the question of complexity.   We turned to Forster’s foundational dichotomy between flat characters and round characters, a supremely useful heuristic for understanding the character types that appear in fiction and which we ourselves will deploy (and in the process of these discussions, derived a surprisingly handy definition of character complexity). 

In our last post I pointed out that what counts as a rounded or complex character is notably subjective.  There is no precise point, no exact line where one turns into another.  Different kinds of texts (and genres) embrace / tolerate different definitions of complexity.  What passes for a rounded character in some traditional heroic fantasy would often be considered super-flat in, say, the literary fiction of Tash Aw or Andrea Levy. 

Dichotomies are awesome for teaching the extremes of the character form, but flounder when trying to grapple with the liminal stuff in the middle.  Which is why I believe our grasp of characters and their functions would benefit greatly by adding a third type of character complexity to the Forster formula.  After all, even a cursory review of the literature shows that there are plenty of protagonist characters that would neither qualify as completely round nor completely flat – protagonists that in my homebrew I call Curved Characters – characters that are complex enough. 

In our last post I mentioned Reacher from the Lee Child series.  That’s a classic curved character.  Easy Rawlins from Walter Mosley’s series is another curver.  Both Easy and Reacher are, without question, complex enough.  Reacher has a familiar gunslinger contradiction at the heart of his build, his phobia of domesticity matched only by his defense of it, a blunt straight-talker but with an almost Sherlock Holmes deductive ability.  Easy, Odysseus-clever, haunted by his WW2 trauma, knows the phantasmagorical color line that is America better than anyone and understands also the futility of capitalism – and yet knows as well that money grants certain safeguards that are better than none.  These are swell characters with fetching personas and pleasing depths, but from another perspective are also formulaic characters. 

Stephen King has made his career writing Curved Characters.

Nor are Curved Characters the sole property of genre.  Some of the protagonists that my most brilliant Booker Prize-winning friend George Saunders deploys are Curved Characters.  Jeffrey in The 400 Pound CEO?  The unnamed narrator of CivilWarLands in Bad Decline?  You could say the same for the protagonists in many of Octavia Butler’s books.  I myself use Curved Characters all the time.  Check out my story The Sun, The Moon, The Stars.  Check out Oscar from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.    

(Remember these are fuzzy sets, and I’m less interested in making definitive arguments as to which character fits into which bucket – flat, rounded, curved – and more interested in trying to use these fuzzy sets as a way of thinking about character making.)   

But here’s where it gets interesting and why curved characters like Easy Rawlins can headline a fourteen-novel series – or why curved characters like Saunder’s Jeffrey, or my Oscar, or Butler’s Lilith can possess all the vastational force of a fully rounded complex character. 

The writer makes up the difference, they bring the ñapa.  The writer drops the Curved Character into merciless or heartbreaking or overwhelming situations (Conflicts) and it is that cunning combination (done well) that produces a complexity that exceeds the character’s curvature. 

For genre protagonists like Easy or Reacher the writer concocts new imaginative perils that require the curved protagonist to improvise – new imaginative perils that give the protagonist’s character new ways to echo.  As long as Childs or Mosley can concoct unique plausible scenarios (aka Conflicts) for Reacher and Easy to defeat, scenarios that recall for readers that exhilarating joy of encountering these prodigies for the first time, Reacher and Easy will live on.

Similarly, Saunders has meek put-upon Jeffrey act out in one dooming outburst — while Butler awakens won’t-quit-can’t-quit Lilith into a horrific ontological alien nightmare — and what emerges is something far greater than the sum of their parts, far greater than what a curved character should be capable of generating on their own.  An emergent alchemy that’s only possible because the protagonists are complex enough to trigger the magic, a magic that will elude characters who are too flat.  In the case of Jeffrey or Lilith what emerges for the reader is a deep pathos, a shaken unfamiliar self, a defining sadness – those hard to capture evanescences of our humanity.