Office Hours

On likability and getting stuck.

This week, going through your questions, I found this gem – so thoughtful, funny, and self-insightful – that I wanted to share it with all of you in its entirety, and then do my best to answer:

Q.

Dear George,

I’d heard over the years that the fiction writer must like or find something to like about a character. I was struggling with a character I disliked for quite awhile before I remembered this. So I found a few traits that were likable. What happened next was amazing—the story opened up. It unfolded like origami so I could follow the lines and re-fold it. Good work in the first ten pages. Then I got to the second section and the story shut down again. Partly because he was likable and I couldn’t find my way to why he would do what comes next.

So I struggled with this for awhile until I remembered what you said about allowing the story/character to guide you. But there is nothing. No sense of it at all. The meter’s felt sense arrow seems to have drooped to zero. The only thing that does come up is this growing pissed-offed-ness towards the whole story, character and process. Maybe this pissed-offed-ness is the meter reading? I don’t have the angry I-hate-the-story-lets-move-on sensation. I’m just really annoyed.

Now I’m following the ‘put it away for awhile’ procedure in the handbook. But all its done is given me time to grow to dislike the traits I found likable. I’m sorry I found ‘likables’. Maybe I should now find ‘hate-ables’? (Lots of unhelpful long interior discussions with myself that I will spare you from.)

Its all so confusing—the emotional dance of it. And I know there is no real procedure handbook though all of these things have helped. Its just I know I’m missing something. Some way of thinking about the situation that will help. The unfolding that occurred was truly amazing when I found likable traits. I’ve found the sense meter useful. Putting things away has helped in some cases. But what is happening with this story is different.

I hoped what might happen is that I’d write this email and answer my own question. But there is nothing — just a blank. Maybe my question is what is the ‘blank’? What does it mean? Is there another way to interpret this sensation and put it to work? <——- Yes! This last question is my question for you.

Signed,

Loveless in Las Vegas (just kidding)

Thanks so much. Your class has taken me upwards to another skill level. Very exciting.

A:

In answering. it occurs to me to focus on this idea that we must find something “likable” about our characters. 

I think this is basically true.  Although I’m not sure we have to “like” the character exactly (I think here of Scrooge, or the Macbeths), but I do think we have to be somehow drawn to that person – interested in him. 

So: how do we make our reader “interested in” (intrigued by, curious about) our characters?

One thing I note in the way our questioner has framed this issue – she has put herself, it seems, in the position of sort of pre-judging what the reader will find “likable.” So, in a sense, she already knows what she thinks about them. 

What if, instead, she tried to be put herself into a state of mind that was not sure about the answer to that question (“Is this character likable), and, in fact, had disqualified the question, by declining to think about it in quite that way (“likable vs not”)? 

How might she think about it?  Well, maybe she could think: “I am in the business of observing and dramatizing certain specific actions, trying to represent these people as vividly as possible.” This quality I’m calling “vividness” is what causes the reader to “believe in” the character and thus be drawn in. 

The writer is, let’s say, so busy depicting those actions vividly that she neglects to judge anything. And because she’s not sure what to think of the character (and may be presenting contradictory signals re “likable” or “not”) the reader will also be unsure – and this is the essence of dramatic urgency.  The reader finds himself doing a form of mental squinting, trying to figure out whether the writer intends this character to be liked or not, and so he keeps reading – keeps walking into the mist of the story, so to speak, intrigued by the writer’s refusal to make a judgment. 

The reader is, in other words, intrigued.

So that’s one way we might think about it.  If that helps, then voila! It is the right way. 

If it doesn’t, here’s another:

What if, instead of talking in terms of likability, we said it this way: “The reader wants to find some vestige of himself in the character.  If he does, he leans in with slightly more interest.”

How might this be done?  Well, the writer might give the character some thoughts or tendencies from her own life and her own ways of thinking (and not just the good stuff).  There’s something about the intimacy of this that draws the reader in and also eliminates that slight feeling of puppeteering that can taint our character work – the feeling that we are “using” a character for some secret conceptual or thematic purpose.

Let’s say we have a character shoplifting in a store that we have been told is owned by a very sweet old widow who has very little money.  Well, as readers, maybe we don’t like that – we don’t like that shoplifter.  But what does that really mean, that we “don’t like her?”  Why would “not liking her” equate to “I don’t want to read about her?”  I have turned off many a TV show because of the presence of a villain who I found too evil to be believed. What was I reacting against?  Well, the writer, actually, who had made this poor facsimile of a human – this one-dimensional thing that is too-obviously meant to represent Evil.  And I react against this because it feels like condescension.  The writer thinks I’ll fall for it.  There’s a feeling that the character has been pre-labeled Evil by the writer and is now  being “phoned in.”  And the writer expects me to sit there and take it, although it runs counter to my actual experience of life.

“Here we go. I just hope my shoes don’t both come untied, one after the other, like last time.”

Now let’s run over to the writer’s side of the table.  Our evil shoplifter is so one-dimensional that she’s about to cause the reader to bail.  Say the writer puts a bit of himself into that shoplifter…something from his stock of experience. (The move, for me, might be something like: I drop into that shoplifter’s body and have a look around.  We are fused, she and I.  Her desire to steal, and my….well, what do I have?  Let’s see.  Ah: she bends to tie her shoe, briefly putting down the thing she is trying to steal.  “Idiot,” she says to herself.  “Are you trying to get caught?  Why can’t you take a break and slow down?  Why are you always so hyper?”  She picks up the item, stands up – and finds that her other shoe has now miraculously untied itself.  And the old lady behind the counter is smiling at her.  “That happens to me all the time,” she seems to be saying with that smile. She (I), the shoplifter, blushes, and…

This little sequence of bumbling - its self-remonstrating, neurotic quality  – is not entirely unfamiliar to me (absent, of course, the attempted stealing).  Is it authentic to my shoplifter?  No, since she doesn’t exist.  I am just making her, out of bits of this and pieces of that.  But infusing her with this “private” or interior thing of mine somehow softens her edges.  It’s not that this was a particularly likable trait – but it was vivid and authentic.  It made a slightly more detailed picture of her and, by that, drew us in.

After reading that addition, don’t you see that shoplifter a little more clearly, and feel more interested in her?  Do you wonder what’s going to happen next?  Is she going to go through with the theft?  Are you curious? 

I am more interested, and I’m the one who just now made that stuff up.

Now, we might say that the shoplifter has become more “likable.” But we could also say that we are more interested in reading more because she has taken on an added dimensionality – she isn’t just one thing.  She’s slightly confusing us.  (Not just the reader but the writer too.) She was in the middle of doing a bad thing, and bumbled it, and self-remonstrated about her bumbling in this neurotic way – and now we don’t know what to think of her and, more importantly, we don’t know what the writer wants us to think about her (because the writer doesn’t know himself). 

Having added that bit, the writer is now newly unsure of what to think of her own character – which is exactly the point.  Mystery is in the air.  Everything remains to be seen. 

The point, maybe, is that it’s fun to be in a story that has not been overdetermined.

One more thought, dear questioner.

This bit caught my eye: “Then I got to the second section and the story shut down again. Partly because he was likable, and I couldn’t find my way to why he would do what comes next.”

Aha!  I thought, you have already decided “what comes next.” Now, you might be right about that, but it might also be that the changes you made in the first section have now rendered your original plan inoperative.  That is, that “what comes next” might have changed, since the section before it – the section that “set it up” – has now changed.

Because you’ve changed the first section, it is now generating an entirely new set of expectations; the reader is in a new place, relative to where she would have been after reading the old section one. 

Whatever comes next needs to come naturally out of that new set of expectations you’ve generated.  It has to.  Otherwise, the second section will feel out of relation to the first one – which it will be, because it existed before the first section and hasn’t been altered to accommodate, or react to, your (dazzling, new) first section.

We might say that the goal of a section of a story is to create a cloud of expectations, there over the head of your reader, which you, the writer, must then exploit, or work with, or use, in the next section. 

So, if the first section changes, the second ought to change to as well, in order to be felt as “in relation with” the first. 

This is, of course, a little maddening.  You have, no doubt, worked hard on that “what comes next.”  There can be a Rubik’s cube quality to this part of the process. But if the second section is not felt as being in organic relation to the new section, the result is going to be a less alert feeling of causation, and the result of that is…a less intense connection between reader and writer and less emotional urgency in the piece.

I’ve sometimes cut a certain scene out of a story-in-progress and set it aside.  Years later, I’ve come back to it and taken a fresh look, with that section now out of the context of the original story.  Suddenly, it starts growing new sprouts.  It’s happy to no longer be in “the wrong” story.  It starts giving new indications of where it wants to go.

This can work the other way around, too.  At present (possibly) you are being held hostage by what you think “comes next.”  If you lop that off and set it aside, the remaining text (that first section) might feel liberated to tell you what it really wants you to do next.

P.S. Below the next bear, some promotional stuff below for the new book. If it bothers you, please exit now/skip it. :)

For our friends in the U.K., a signed edition promotion with Waterstones.