Characters: Round and Flat

What do reviewers and editors mean when they say a character is “flat”?  Is that necessarily a bad thing?

It depends. A writer needs some characters to be walk-ons whose sole function is to give scenes the feel of reality. Readers glance at these characters and move on, assuming that these walk-ons have fully dimensional lives that are not important to the telling of this particular story.

The flattest of these are window dressing: an army, a crowd, customers in a restaurant, kids in a high school hallway. Others are a bit more defined but are still one dimensional: the round-faced salesman, the mother constantly snapping her finger at her unfocused four-year-old, the librarian peering over her reading glasses as a young man steps up to check out a book. Flat or one-dimensional characters function as a writer’s shorthand in the world of the story.

The more details we add, the more dimensional a character becomes. Take the one- dimensional young man in the library example. Let’s name him Dorian. He’s still not well rounded, but his name does suggest a personality. We could rename him Gus. Or Alex. Or Bob. Each name suggests a different person and gives him more dimension. But only a little. Let’s go further. What book does he ask for? War and Peace? Knuffle Bunny? Building the Small House? The book he asks for will change how we see him.

Let’s say Dorian is asking for War and Peace. His hair is long on top, trimmed short at the neck, and he keeps flicking his head to get a forelock out of his eyes. He wears jeans with a hole in one knee, a gray tee, and flip-flops. Let’s go further and give him some dialogue. “Excuse me, but I’m looking for War and Peace. Could you direct me to the right shelf?” Or “Hey, I’ve gotta get this really big book on peace . . . and war . . . written by a Russian guy.” Either way, we get a better picture of him. He’s rounder.

Here’s the deal: The rounder we make Dorian, the more he moves into “major character” territory. In other words, the more we describe him and the more dimensional he becomes, the more the reader focuses on him and expects him to matter to the plot. If he is not a major or secondary character, we need to leave him fairly flat. Otherwise he’s simply a distraction. (Of course if you’re writing a mystery, you may want to fool the reader into thinking he is important – make him a “red herring – to draw attention away from the real villain you’ll reveal later.)

In some novels, especially action-driven stories, legal thrillers, and mysteries, even main characters can get by in a less than fully rounded state. But in a character-driven novel, the main character and any other point-of-view characters need to be fully dimensional. They need to feel real. Otherwise, readers, reviewers and editors may comment: “interesting plot, but the characters were flat and not fully developed.”

© 2012 Karyn Henley. All rights reserved. Photo courtesy morguefile.com

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The See-Saw of a Scene

Remember riding a see-saw when you were a kid? Or maybe you called it a teeter-totter. You had to find the right balance in order to go up and down. When scenes in novels are well written, they’re like see-saws, shifting the weight back and forth between two characters or between a character and a situation. All that shifting helps to create the tension that keeps readers reading.

As novelists, our job is to put our main character in a situation that’s out of balance, so we often start a novel with what’s sometimes called “a destabilizing event.” We begin “on the day that was different,” the day the scale is tipped. The character is now out of balance, and the rest of the novel shows the character trying to get back into balance. Often the character discovers that it’s impossible to restore the old balance. The old balance no longer works, so the entire novel see-saws until the character finds some kind of balance.

But one character’s idea of balance is often the other character’s idea of imbalance. In other words, each character feels balanced when the scale is tipped in her favor. I just finished reading Sarah Dessen’s The Truth About Forever. The mother of main character Macy feels balanced when everything is predictable, while Macy’s new friends feel balanced when situations are unpredictable. Macy see-saws between the two, trying to find her own balance.

Each scene in a novel is a see-saw on a smaller scale, showing how characters attempt to balance. Depending on the intensity of the scene, the back and forth see-saw can turn into a tug of war. Or a real war. The scene is over when some kind of balance is reached or a new event happens that throws the character into greater imbalance. The main character may jump off one see-saw onto an even bigger one.

As in real life, a character may live with a balance that’s not in her favor because it feels familiar; it has become her comfort zone. She tries to avoid tipping the scale. She tries to keep an even keel. In real life, a person can live this way. But not in a novel. Writers must tip the scale. We have to send our characters scrambling. We watch how they find their footing, all the while intending to throw them off balance again and again. Devious, aren’t we? But that’s the way we see – and show – what our characters are made of. And that’s the way we tell a story.

© 2012 Karyn Henley. All rights reserved. Photo courtesy morguefile.com

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Experts Aren’t Always

Rudyard Kipling once received this rejection from a publisher regarding a manuscript he submitted: “I’m sorry, Mr. Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use the English language.” (He wrote Jungle Book, Just-So Stories, Gunga Din, among others, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907.)

Writers often joke that they’ve collected enough rejection letters to wallpaper a house. (Or at least a bathroom.) I have it on good authority that Kate DiCamillo received 400 rejections before her award-winning, bestselling Because of Winn-Dixie was published. (And was later made into a movie.)

Most rejection letters are simply form letters:”Not right for us at this time.” If the letter contains a critique, we consider it and may tweak a manuscript accordingly. We know persistence is the name of the game. But even when we look on the bright side, rejection hurts. We remind ourselves that many famous authors have persisted in the face of rejection, and many publishers have ended up wishing they hadn’t said no. Among those who have been rejected:

To Emily Dickinson: “They (her poems) are quite as remarkable for defects as for beauties and are generally devoid of true poetical qualities.”

For Dr. Seuss’s And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street: ” . . . too different from other juveniles on the market to warrant its selling.”

For George Orwell’s Animal Farm: “It is impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A.” (Maybe someone at that publishing house didn’t actually read it.)

For Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: ” . . . I regret to say that the book is unsaleable and unpublishable.” (Made into movies, this book’s sales and longevity are nothing to shrug at.)

For Zane Grey’s Last of the Plainsmen: “I do not see anything in this to convince me you can write either narrative or fiction.” (Grey was one of the first millionaire authors with over 100 books, many bestsellers, many made into films.)

Re a submission of The Diary of Anne Frank: “The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the ‘curiosity’ level.”

For The Bridge Over the River Kwai by Pierre Boulle: “A very bad book.” (Which became a popular novel, later made into a popular film.)

For Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth: “Regret the American public is not interested in anything on China.” (This book was required reading by the time I was in junior high.)

For Jean Auel’s The Clan of the Cave Bear: ” . . . we don’t think we could distribute enough copies to satisfy you or ourselves.” (As of 2010, this series had sold over 45 million copies worldwide.)

So, fellow writers, the bottom line is: Write the best you can today. Write better tomorrow. And don’t take rejection personally. Experts aren’t always.

(Read more in Rotten Reviews and Rejections, edited by Bill Henderson and Andre Bernard.)

© 2012 Karyn Henley. All rights reserved. Photo courtesy morguefile.com

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Rafting Down a Novel

Reading a novel can be like whitewater rafting. Many streams flow into a river, and many currents flow into the main story of a novel, rushing readers toward the rapids.

As a reader, you may not see all the streams running through a novel, but the ones you do see are usually streams you recognize from your own life. Maybe the courage of the main character inspires you, because you need courage. Or your conscience nudges you when the character is too angry to forgive. Is it the love story that grabs you? Or the sense of betrayal the main character feels? Do you identify with the character’s struggle to forge his or her own identity?

Most of us raft through a novel for the joy of the ride, but we can learn a lot about ourselves by noticing the streams that challenge us. Which streams make you think? Which streams affect you emotionally? Which streams become whitewater for you? Professor Timothy Spurgin, in his course “The Art of Reading,” suggests that we readers ask, “How has this story exposed me to myself?”

You probably won’t be aware of all the streams that flow into any given novel. In fact, it’s not necessary to see them all. Even I, as an author, don’t see all the streams in my own novels. A friend read an early draft of Eye of the Sword and said it’s a novel about brothers. I was surprised, because I hadn’t seen that stream, even though I had rafted the novel dozens of times. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized she was right.

Some novel streams might best be called “themes” (or “threads,” although that’s a different metaphor). When you’re reading and notice a stream or theme resonating deeply with you, you’ve entered the territory of truth in fiction. Fiction may not be factual, but it must tell the truth. About you. On this raft, you’ll get wet.

So grab your binoculars, put on your life vest, hop aboard the raft, and watch out for whitewater. Happy rafting!

© 2012 Karyn Henley. All rights reserved. Photo courtesy morguefile.com

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Story vs. Plot

Story is “the chopped-off length of the tapeworm of time.” So said novelist E.M. Forster, whose book Aspects of the Novel is a classic. To Forster, story is transcended by plot, because story is a mere sequence of events: This happened and then that. Story is episodic.

Plot, on the other hand, is the writer’s arrangement of those events. In the hands of a writer, some story events are actually backstory and may or may not be useful in the novel. Other events may be told out of order as flashbacks or as topics of dialogue. And of course, many events are told chronologically. In any case, “plot is the writer’s choice of events and their design in time,” writes Robert McKee in his classic, Story.

I think of story as the whole ball of clay and plot as the shape into which the clay is sculpted. According to Timothy Spurgin in The Art of Reading, plot is what gives the story a “sense of direction.” Plot is the story’s arc or structure.

Perhaps the most quoted example of story vs. plot comes from Forster: Story is “the king died and then the queen died.” Plot is “the king died and then the queen died of grief.” Maybe I can make the difference even clearer: “the king died and then the queen died drinking the same poison.” To me, story asks, “What happened?” Plot asks, “Why?”

Plot is cause and effect. In my mind, that involves characters and their motives. I can have a story idea, but until I have a character or two, I don’t know where the story is going or how best to tell it. In my first drafts, characters provide the “why” and often nudge my story in unexpected directions. Then after I have a first draft, I study the story scene by scene to make sure each one serves the story. Because that’s what plot does. Plot serves the story, tells it the best way possible.

I’ve heard that more has been written about plot than any other aspect of writing. I’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg here. If you want to dig further into plot, take a look at the books I’ve mentioned, as well as The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler. There are many more books that address plot, but these will serve you well.

I leave you with one more metaphor: While a story simmers, a plot thickens. So whether you’re reading or writing, bon appetit!

© 2012 Karyn Henley. All rights reserved. Photo courtesy morguefile.com

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