How to ask the hard questions when working with problematic fictional characters.
Writing saved my love life. And vice versa.
You see, I didn’t begin writing until midlife, and until then, true love illuded me. It took a while to understand how my shortcomings as a writer reflected my shortcomings as a human being.
In my early stories, I had the nasty habit of killing off my characters. The death count was stunning. My writing coach, while reading a draft of my first novel, wrote in the margin, “Don’t tell me you plan to kill this character, too! I refuse to go to one more funeral!”
She had zeroed in on my creative dilemma. I loved creating characters, but once I was done using them, I had no idea what to do with them.
So, I usually killed them. I hung them, shot them, drowned them, flung them through windshields, and had them eaten alive by alligators in the Mississippi swamps. I thought I was being creative. That death made the story exciting.
“The deaths aren’t necessary for the story,” Mary wrote. “It comes off as contrived, predictable, and totally unbelievable.”
When the sting of Mary’s brutal delivery softened, and my shame subsided, I picked up the liberally marked manuscript and read through Mary’s notes. On the very back page, one suggestion stood out. “Why don’t you let you characters live one more chapter and see what happens?”
Ridiculous! I thought.
But then, over the next few days, my imagination kicked in. What would happen if I let my characters live? For one more chapter.”
I opened my laptop and scrolled through the manuscript. Each time I conveniently killed off a character was an act of authorial cowardice. I decided to allow them to exist for a few pages more pages.
When I did, that character brought me up against some vulnerability within myself I wanted to avoid. Pushing them forward meant reaching deeper into myself than I was comfortable with. It forced me to open myself up to some hidden insecurity or nagging doubt or unpleasant memory, which in turn gave a depth of humanity to the character and richness to the story. Each character posed a difficult question that I needed to answer if they were to live. How does one continue living in the world after tragedy strikes? Or after the birth of a child or its death? After your husband leaves you. After you lose your job. After you have been betrayed by all you hold sacred? My characters wanted to take me to a very messy place.
Simply showing a character the exit is no solution. I needed to allow the character the time and space to reveal themselves. Than meant investing some of myself into them. I needed to allow the discomfort instead of shutting it down.
Writing taught me that you can’t ask a character to go to a place you, yourself, aren’t willing to go.
Same with people.
Mary had forced me to confront a flaw in my own character. When I was done with people, when they had served my purposes, or I believed that the next step in the relationship would be too hard, too scary or require too much vulnerability, I found a good reason to dump them. I had done this with my family. A multitude of friends. My life journey is littered with the discarded pages ripped from my address books. Killing people off had been easier than doing the difficult next thing, which was to show up as my unscripted self.
Not long after this discovery, I met Jim. Things went well until our fourth date, about the time I typically discover a fatal flaw and run for the hills. That night, right on schedule, Jim made an attempt at humor, I can’t remember what he said, but I felt I was the butt of his joke. I felt shamed, diminished, and dismissed. Exactly what happens, I thought, when you let someone get too close. This was precisely why I avoided intimacy, and Jim was proving me right. I immediately shut down. It was enough for me to decide to never see him again.
But with Mary’s advice still fresh, I couldn’t fool myself into believing my need to break it off with Jim was anything but cowardice. I didn’t want the messiness of a confrontation or a fight. I didn’t want to go to a place with Jim that I couldn’t control. I didn’t want to trust him not to hurt me. That night, I made the most important decision in my life.
I decided to let Jim live one more chapter.
I told him that he had hurt my feelings. I braced for the usual, “You’re just too sensitive,” or “Can’t you take a joke?” or “Yeah, well, you’re not so perfect, yourself.” Or worst of all, to act like my words had wounded him, that my feelings were dangerous, and I needed to apologize for my reality. That he, like my parents and nearly every man I had ever dated, was the one who needed taking care of.
Instead, he said, “I’m sorry. I can see how that would hurt.”
It was at that moment I fell in love. Because I didn’t flee from intimacy, Jim was able to reveal himself to me. And has been for the last twenty years.
I owe a lot to Mary. Now, when I have the urge to lash out, flee, or otherwise create an unbridgeable chasm between me and another, I try to remember her advice. “Why not let the character live for one more chapter and see what happens?”
It’s still difficult. I will probably always have the tendency to avoid the hard work of emotional vulnerability, but at least now I know the cost, in love as well as writing. Often, failure is not that the characters won’t go where I want them to go. It is that I am resisting going where the characters need to me to go.
In writing, as well in life, when I have problematic characters, I’ve learned to ask myself, what are they asking of me than I’m refusing to give?
Author Bio
Jonathan Odell is the author of three novels, The View from Delphi (Macadam Cage 2004) The Healing, (Random House 2012) Miss Hazel (Maiden Lane Press 2015). His essays and short stories have appeared in The New York Times, Commonweal, Publishers Weekly, and others. He lives in Minneapolis with his husband.
Featured image of dead spider in web by Liu on Unsplash