Giving Your Characters a Hard Time
Posted by Andie Ryan Blog at 10/9/2010 1:34 PM 
Categories: Conflict, Fiction Writing Junkies, Characterization
Tags: Hemingway symbolism character short story Hills Like White Elephants conflict denouement Helen Keller three-dimensional characters story workshops fiction Twilight Zone
Categories: Conflict, Fiction Writing Junkies, Characterization
Tags: Hemingway symbolism character short story Hills Like White Elephants conflict denouement Helen Keller three-dimensional characters story workshops fiction Twilight Zone
Helen Keller once said, "Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering, can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved."
While this certainly applies to our own development as human beings and our ability to understand one another, it also applies to character development in fiction.
Character and conflict are deeply intertwined. We build stories by inventing challenges for our characters to face, and then exploring how well, or how poorly, our characters respond to these challenges. How they choose either to face or ignore these challenges is the stuff of human interaction and the heart of a story. How does a character deal with his own resulting suffering? How does he respond to the suffering of others? The answers help to define who your characters are.
Conflict needn't be characterized by weeping and wailing and other overt displays of emotionalism. It's best if it isn't. Conflict can be internal (an emotional struggle within a character that must be resolved, or not, by the character himself) or external (blowing up the Death Star despite a vast enemy army). The best stories usually include both.
For those of who don't like these labels, which can sometimes seem too confining or conventional, take a close look at your manuscripts. You will usually be able to find evidence of some kind of conflict by whatever name you choose to give it -- tension, counterpoint, adversity. A rose by any other name. But still a necessity. Even jazz improvisation observes some kind of structure.
Maintaining running responses to the following five questions can help you to build your story and establish its conflicts with greater precision. Consider recording both internal and external forces and influences. Expect to refine your responses as you progress through a draft, and expect some of the answers to change or expand as you get to know your characters better:
1) What does your character want? (desire)
2) Why does he want it? (motivation)
3) What obstacles must your character overcome to get what he wants? (conflict)
4) Does he succeed? (resolution; plot denouement)
5) What changes for your character as a result of the conflict? (aftermath; character denouement)
The last is sometimes the most troublesome. In workshops, students frequently ask why things necessarily have to change for a character. Can't things remain the same? Can't the character end up back where he started?
Not really. By itself, it's not as profound as it sounds. Even if things end up back where they started in your story, it's with some kind of realization or knowledge that your characters didn't have at the beginning. Any narrative profundity or meaning stems from there.
Conflict and challenge are all around us in life, and they naturally give rise to some kind of change, however small. In order for your stories to remain true, conflict is a necessary structural element.
While you may have some characters that refuse to change because of their role in your story (a villain or adversary may remain so), your main characters will usually experience a shift in thinking or feeling between the beginning and the end of your story -- even if they lose the conflict or find themselves in the same physical place or situation.
Not that we want to discount our villains. Your readers may have a better understanding of why your villains are the way they are, and why they want what they want. In this sense, one purpose of your story is to reveal. You've heard about the difference between one-dimensional and three-dimensional characters. It's the difference between a man walking, and a man walking in switchback-like movements to avoid cracks in the sidewalk. These added dimensions are important even for peripheral characters because they establish additional conflicts.
But the characters that most readers will connect with (perhaps even your villain) are those engaged in the main struggle -- whatever it is -- and everything you include in your story should feed into that struggle and your characters' journey toward that struggle's resolution.
This doesn't mean that characters always get what they want. A character's acceptance of a once undesired outcome can also represent a significant emotional realization or change. Remember the Twilight Zone episode where a feeble, elderly couple goes to purchase brand new, youthful, healthy bodies? They can only afford one. The husband gets it, but then both realize that they will lose the life they have together -- and their love -- if he keeps it. So he gives it up. At the end, they walk out together in the same feeble condition. But they have a very different understanding. And what they want is revealed to be different from what they thought they wanted.
Hemingway's short story, Hills Like White Elephants, is often used to study conflict because the story -- about a couple deciding whether to have an abortion -- is so rich in serene symbolism that the conflict itself is muted, and all the more unsettling for it. It's frequently observed that there is no resolution in this story, but there is. No matter which of two paths the couple chooses, their lives will be changed forever and one of them will be giving up some measure of happiness to appease the other. The inevitability of change is certain regardless of their decision. We don't know the plot's actual denouement, but Hemingway provides enough information to let us glimpse how each of the two outcomes would unfold for each character. Each character would experience their own alterations no matter what the final decision.
Your story may be crafted with this kind of subtlety, or your characters may blow up the Death Star. Either way, give your characters a hard time. Put up barriers. Throw obstacles in their path and make them fight their way through. And just when they think it's safe, give them something else to deal with. Let your characters take their own journey and be inspired, strengthened, disappointed, or resigned as a consequence of that journey.
As in life.
While this certainly applies to our own development as human beings and our ability to understand one another, it also applies to character development in fiction.
Character and conflict are deeply intertwined. We build stories by inventing challenges for our characters to face, and then exploring how well, or how poorly, our characters respond to these challenges. How they choose either to face or ignore these challenges is the stuff of human interaction and the heart of a story. How does a character deal with his own resulting suffering? How does he respond to the suffering of others? The answers help to define who your characters are.
Conflict needn't be characterized by weeping and wailing and other overt displays of emotionalism. It's best if it isn't. Conflict can be internal (an emotional struggle within a character that must be resolved, or not, by the character himself) or external (blowing up the Death Star despite a vast enemy army). The best stories usually include both.
For those of who don't like these labels, which can sometimes seem too confining or conventional, take a close look at your manuscripts. You will usually be able to find evidence of some kind of conflict by whatever name you choose to give it -- tension, counterpoint, adversity. A rose by any other name. But still a necessity. Even jazz improvisation observes some kind of structure.
Maintaining running responses to the following five questions can help you to build your story and establish its conflicts with greater precision. Consider recording both internal and external forces and influences. Expect to refine your responses as you progress through a draft, and expect some of the answers to change or expand as you get to know your characters better:
1) What does your character want? (desire)
2) Why does he want it? (motivation)
3) What obstacles must your character overcome to get what he wants? (conflict)
4) Does he succeed? (resolution; plot denouement)
5) What changes for your character as a result of the conflict? (aftermath; character denouement)
The last is sometimes the most troublesome. In workshops, students frequently ask why things necessarily have to change for a character. Can't things remain the same? Can't the character end up back where he started?
Not really. By itself, it's not as profound as it sounds. Even if things end up back where they started in your story, it's with some kind of realization or knowledge that your characters didn't have at the beginning. Any narrative profundity or meaning stems from there.
Conflict and challenge are all around us in life, and they naturally give rise to some kind of change, however small. In order for your stories to remain true, conflict is a necessary structural element.
While you may have some characters that refuse to change because of their role in your story (a villain or adversary may remain so), your main characters will usually experience a shift in thinking or feeling between the beginning and the end of your story -- even if they lose the conflict or find themselves in the same physical place or situation.
Not that we want to discount our villains. Your readers may have a better understanding of why your villains are the way they are, and why they want what they want. In this sense, one purpose of your story is to reveal. You've heard about the difference between one-dimensional and three-dimensional characters. It's the difference between a man walking, and a man walking in switchback-like movements to avoid cracks in the sidewalk. These added dimensions are important even for peripheral characters because they establish additional conflicts.
But the characters that most readers will connect with (perhaps even your villain) are those engaged in the main struggle -- whatever it is -- and everything you include in your story should feed into that struggle and your characters' journey toward that struggle's resolution.
This doesn't mean that characters always get what they want. A character's acceptance of a once undesired outcome can also represent a significant emotional realization or change. Remember the Twilight Zone episode where a feeble, elderly couple goes to purchase brand new, youthful, healthy bodies? They can only afford one. The husband gets it, but then both realize that they will lose the life they have together -- and their love -- if he keeps it. So he gives it up. At the end, they walk out together in the same feeble condition. But they have a very different understanding. And what they want is revealed to be different from what they thought they wanted.
Hemingway's short story, Hills Like White Elephants, is often used to study conflict because the story -- about a couple deciding whether to have an abortion -- is so rich in serene symbolism that the conflict itself is muted, and all the more unsettling for it. It's frequently observed that there is no resolution in this story, but there is. No matter which of two paths the couple chooses, their lives will be changed forever and one of them will be giving up some measure of happiness to appease the other. The inevitability of change is certain regardless of their decision. We don't know the plot's actual denouement, but Hemingway provides enough information to let us glimpse how each of the two outcomes would unfold for each character. Each character would experience their own alterations no matter what the final decision.
Your story may be crafted with this kind of subtlety, or your characters may blow up the Death Star. Either way, give your characters a hard time. Put up barriers. Throw obstacles in their path and make them fight their way through. And just when they think it's safe, give them something else to deal with. Let your characters take their own journey and be inspired, strengthened, disappointed, or resigned as a consequence of that journey.
As in life.
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