(The following is an excerpt from my book Novelsmithing.)
Character motivations, wishes and desires, are the driving forces behind the novel. Character emotion exerts dramatic pressure on the storyline and forces it forward. Therefore, without interesting, highly motivated characters the novel loses its emotional impact.
The situation is even more critical, however, than just having interesting characters. The reading experience can only become personal through characters. The more intimate the contact with a character, the more the reader will react emotionally. In dramatic fiction, the reader must be allowed to view both the fictional world and feel the human impact of the story. To receive the human impact, the reader must have an affinity for one or more of the characters. The reader then gets a human perspective on events. The character must be someone threatened and pushed about by events. Otherwise the novel becomes little more than a narrative history.
AUTHOR/CHARACTER RELATIONSHIP
The relationship between author and character is fraught with paradox. The author, in a sense, resides within all his characters (and will always absorb some of their neuroses). Ironically, only by getting your characters away from you can you get that closeness needed to relate to them and write them properly. We say to hook up with voice and write from within the character. Approach all your characters through their senses. Listen to them, and let their experience generate your words. If your character climbs on a horse, we need to feel the saddle, smell the leather, and sense the height. In that way, you’ll be able to determine what jumps off the page and is “alive,” as opposed to that which lingers lifelessly on the page.
As human beings, we know so little about ourselves that we have difficulty relating to a character that we see as ourselves. A good exercise is to write about someone we view as our opposite. This is one of the best ways to identify that hidden part of ourselves that our characters represent. In Madam Bovary, Flaubert so completely identified with Emma Bovary that, when he described her suicide, he could taste the arsenic in his own mouth.
The taste of arsenic was so really in my mouth when I described how Emma Bovary was poisoned, that it cost me two indigestions one upon the other quite real ones, for I vomited my dinner.16
Every author strives for that closeness, so much so that many authors feel that they are not creating a character, but channeling one.
READER/CHARACTER RELATIONSHIP
In the next chapter, we’ll investigate the role of the narrator, the voice that tells the story. The relationship between reader and narrator is much the same as the relationship between reader and character, but distinct differences sometimes do exist, so it’s best to talk about character separately.
In Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, we see the novel’s world and its events through the eyes of a poet. He is our “camera to the world;” more than that, we gauge our reaction by the impact events have upon him, and we suffer along with him. This is as it should be. The reader always gives up a part of himself to one or more of the characters in a good novel, and rides piggyback on those characters’ feelings. The relationship between reader and character is illustrated in Figure 3:
Character- Reader Relationship
Figure 3
The reader emotionally attaches to a character and experiences the world and events through him. Only in this way does the novel simulate a real experience instead of just hearsay. It’s crucial that the author understand the importance of this. The reader must “experience” the story, and he can only experience the drama vicariously, through a character.
As you’ll learn in the next chapter, the reader is in a state of total sensory deprivation, and must have a surrogate who feels and experiences for him in the fictional world. Whenever we, as readers, are deprived of this character contact, the fictional dream dims and we lose interest. The exception, of course, is the occasional use of narrative summary, which does not have to be “experienced,” and by way of which information may be received secondhand.
The more plot-driven the story, the more it will seem contrived. To prevent this, the author must let the characters drive the plot. A character’s emotions and wishes exert dramatic pressure on the storyline and force it to flow naturally. Some academics call the storyline the “wish-line.” Emotional energy causes things to happen. Emotions produce the intensity and vividness that keep the story interesting. Character feelings stretch along the thread of storyline like pearls strung along a necklace.
Novelsmithing