Why characters are key
One of my favorite definitions of what a novel is and does comes from Jane Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, a chronicle of her experience of reading a hundred novels, from the thousand-year-old Tale of Genji to Jennifer Egan’s 2001 Look at Me. Surveying this field of authors at the beginning of the book, she observes: “We have to be struck by two facts: one is that most of them started out as nobodies, and the other is that many of them have come to be regarded as prophets and sages. Their job is to develop a theory of how it feels to be alive” (my emphasis).
Discard the word theory if it feels too stiff, too academic to you. Replace it with picture or maybe even with a verb: Novelists show readers how it feels to be alive. I like this definition because it is reader-focused and human-centered. It encapsulates why show-don’t-tell is one of the central rules of fiction writing.
So how do novelists achieve this magic trick, the one that is so powerful that, when they pull it off, they are hailed as prophets and sages? The key, I think, is in the feels. Readers need to believe that they are getting access to how it feels for your point-of-view character to be alive. And that’s why creating rich characters is absolutely fundamental to the success of your story. Novelists take us into the experiences, minds, and emotions of their characters in a way that we can never access in real life.
Is it a tragedy that we can never know anyone as fully as we know ourselves? Or is it a blessing? Empaths (who, I’d guess, are overrepresented among novelists) know that sometimes even seeing the surface contours of another’s pain can be almost too much to bear. I’ve long had a theory that reading gossip magazines and watching reality television stems from the same impulse that pulls us to novels. We are insatiably curious about our fellow humans and collect information about people the way magpies collect shiny objects. (Again, novelists are likely to be those who are more curious than others.)
Novels bridge that impossible gap between self and other. E. M. Forster puts it perfectly in Aspects of the Novel: “We cannot understand each other, except in a rough and ready way; we cannot reveal ourselves even when we want to; what we call intimacy is only a makeshift; perfect knowledge is an illusion. But in the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life.” Novels also give us a safe space for exploring the dark alleys that scare us, the anxiety mountains we will never scale. Readers travel to these places on the backs of characters.
My guess is that most novels also grow out of an exploration of specific characters. I know this is true of all of my own manuscript drafts. You become fascinated by a certain person or personality or characteristic or type and begin imagining how their psychology works, how they might respond in certain situations. Often, this is enough to get you started, but it may not be enough to pull you through to the ending.
I’ve worked with many novelists who have gotten lost in the muddy middle of their manuscript because they haven’t yet identified the key bit that Smiley’s word theory is reaching for. It’s the why of the novel. Why is your character behaving the way they are? Why are they making one choice and not another? Why do they hold the beliefs they do about the world? All of these why’s eventually add up to the how of Smiley’s equation: how it feels to be alive.
In order to earn your sage badge, you have to convince your reader that you have a compelling, coherent story about how it feels to be alive. To pull it off, you have to get your reader to believe in your protagonist. The character must come alive in order for the reader to believe in your story or theory about how it feels to be alive.
Next week I’ll talk more about techniques you can use to create this illusion for your readers. In the meantime, pay special attention in the coming week to moments when you feel especially alive. What made those moments stand out? And how could you communicate them to a reader through the vehicle of a character?
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