Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water. ~Kurt Vonnegut
Story Challenge | WEEK 2 | Character... and how desire propels, threatens, buoys, sinks, consumes, and sometimes resurrects every sailor on the sea of our stories + the real reason fiction is scary
Hello, hello, and some quick reminders and announcements!
If you’re not a paid subscriber yet and want to participate, you can manage your subscription here—and if you’re super new here and want more info about the Story Challenge, you can find that here, here, and here. Also, throughout the Story Challenge, I’ll be referring to a literary concept called concrete specific detail. If you want a review of this powerful, consistently crucial tool, you can find that in the first post of the Essay Challenge, The Things Themselves, with its shimmers/shards exercise, or in the Eleven Things post here.
For full-access subscribers (Substack’s founding-member tier):
and I will be sending out the first Story Challenge Voice Memo next Wednesday, December 20, to answer questions that’ve come up so far and also to comment on what we’re seeing in the comments, plus a short discussion of the power of place on the page. We’ve also now scheduled the Live Salons on Zoom! We’ll do a Q & A on Friday, January 19, 12:30 - 1 PM Central and a group reading (so fun!) on Saturday, March 2, 11-noon Central. Mark your calendars! (And if you are new and want to know more about WITD’s full-access, interactive subscription level, you can find more info here and feel free to ask questions).
As for our first week of this adventure, holy wow!
I am blown away by your contributions to week one of Story Challenge. I have had the best week ever just reading your scenes and reveling in the utterly luminous, unpredictable quality of imagination, language, invention, and surprise you’ve rendered in these snippets.
And your willingness to jump in—in spite of understandable reservations!—has been so inspiring. As one participant put it, “It's a bit scary trying something ‘weird’ in public, but I'm having fun!” So many of you said the same, and did you know we have more than 300 comments on Week One Beginnings post of this Story Challenge?! If you haven’t had a chance to peruse this rich tapestry of story-in-the-making, do check it out. It’s wonderful. (Also, the Beginnings post gives a very brief outline of how we interact in the challenge through the comments, which you might find helpful if you’re new).
This week will be a crash course in characterization fueled by profound curiosity that brings characters fully to life on the page. (And by the way, when we apply this curiosity to our lived stories, they come to life in ways they never, ever could otherwise, which I have written about here).
But before we jump into our Week Two exercise—where we’ll play with building a character—I want to admit to you that I was nervous about giving such a playful, almost silly opening exercise, cautious about asking you to rewrite the beginning of Little Red Riding Hood in media res (and from in an intentionally selected point of view).
Why was I nervous, cautious?
For a few reasons, actually, and not just because I knew it would be a little scary (more on that in a moment). But first and foremost, I was nervous because I care so much about sharing an embodied example of how playful is the portal to the profound, and how the English word silly emerged from the German word selig, meaning soulful.
When this concept was taught to me, it changed my writing practice in fundamental, permanent ways. Over time, it changed my life, too. My belief in this link between playful and profound underlies the entirety of my creative work now, and also informs my teaching. Recognizing that creativity cannot happen in “closed mode” (see the work of creative genius John Cleese) makes it possible for me to work with full investment and no attachment, another key ingredient to a vibrant and alive creative practice.
In other words, the absolute most damning thing, the most limiting and self-destructive thing we can do to when we enter into a process of learning or a process of creative discovery is to insist, whether overtly or covertly, that we make something that is “good.” That we do A-plus work. That we “get it right.” That we “perform well.” What we want to do instead is to throw off the ill-fitting mandates of compulsory education instead allow ourselves to soften into the unknown and ungoverned space of discovery and give ourselves full permission, make it wholly safe for ourselves, to do something new.
Of course, many of you, perhaps even most of you, are not fiction writers, and therefore you may have had understandable reservations about trying something so different. Even if everything we are studying is in service to the goal of making all of our writing across genre more alive, more powerful, more compelling, more real, and more true (which it is). But even those of you who do write fiction could justifiably wonder about the value of doing fictional exercises with an old fairy tale … you know, kind of like, what’s the point, if any, if I can’t use this for anything?
But here is the thing. As artists, we simply must push ourselves out of our comfort zone. It’s crucial. And regarding the question of “using” what we make, I remind myself and my students frequently that we must, if we are to grow artistically, practice “anti-capitalist” writing. What I mean is this: the quickest way to fence ourselves in and shut ourselves down creatively is by expecting and requiring everything we make to be “useful” or “productive” in some way. It’s a very unfair expectation to put on our creative practice! A creative practice must, by absolute necessity, make room for learning and practicing things that produce material of no immediate “value.” We have to allow ourselves to experiment and engage in activities that are about process, not product.
Despite these strong beliefs, I was nervous about asking you to write scenes from LRRH for another reason, which is this: Writing fiction is simply scary. Why? Not in spite of the fact, but because of the fact that it’s playful. Fiction is uncontrolled. Anything can happen—literally anything. Writing fiction is the opposite of coloring in a coloring book. Writing fiction is building whole worlds. Writing fiction is shaping characters from the clay of your imagination. Writing fiction is unleashing your imagination and supercharging in ways that can let it loose in your real life! Writing fiction is making things happen on the page (and, again, by extension, also in your life). Writing fiction involves creating problems—and solving them, or not. Writing fiction is playing God. Writing fiction is powerful precisely because it involves … playing. And playing is, for many of us adults, not especially comfortable—-particularly when the rules of the game are unfamiliar or non-existent. And yet, as noted, wholly necessary to the artistic process.
Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
— Heraclitus 500 BCE, philosopher
So, when asking people to write a scene from LRRH in such a nakedly playful way, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but boy oh boy was I wrong to worry. You have supercharged this Story Challenge and upped the ante on it, to be honest. After seeing what you’re all capable of, I’m even more excited to see what we’re going to get done next!
So—we’re talking about character this week; that is, how to write a fully realized character, a character we’ll believe and even recognize, a character we’ll care about, a character we’ll maybe love or hate or pity. A character we’ll never forget.
It’s a high bar, but let’s give it a go. We’re going to channel our inner Elizabeth Strout (Pulitzer-winning novelist and author of Olive Kitteridge, et al) because Strout uses a very particular process with regard to her characters. She says that now, her characters tend to appear fully formed, arriving as:
…a visitation, and [they'] keep returning to me, as if to say, Surely, you are not done with me yet. I have such a deep relationship with them. In order for me to write about them, I need to inhabit them as fully as possible.
And you know what? Some of you already did this last week with your characters from LRRH! You created shockingly real individuals (some that even felt fully formed!) in our opening exercise. And to the creative nonfiction writers among us (myself included!), remember: CNF has characters, too, and practicing the art of characterization will move our CNF work forward in exciting new ways.
But, in order to grant ourselves enough flexibility and freedom to “inhabit” our characters and in that way bring them to life, we’ll need to take a character-first approach to story this week, as described by the Purdue Online Writing Lab this way:
The character-first approach … asks a writer to build a character that they find interesting and then assemble the plot around her. For example, a character who is struggling to overcome a phobia might, as a plot element, come into contact with the thing she fears. Success in this instance would mean that she doesn’t let the fear overcome her.
Until I got started on the novel I am currently working on, which came to me first as a plot idea with a character attached, rather than vice versa, I would only have ideas for characters and never advance to plot, which kept me stuck (a conversation for later in this Challenge). The characters that came to me back then usually had specific, strange obsessions. For example, the woman who thought she could communicate with owls. Or the woman whose home improvement and crafts projects seemed normal enough until she became obsessed with shellac and shellacking everything in the house, including a slender strand of her baby’s hair … while it was still attached to the baby.
What I did not understand early on when my characters emerged from the ether was that their obsessions were not quite enough to make them real. A good start, yes, because obsessions are in fact fascinating, but we must go farther.
What a character needs, in order to begin to take real shape, become closer to fully formed, is at least three things and ideally, four.
We’ll use those three or four essential ingredients this week to introduce a character in our 100-word snippets, and I can’t wait to see what you come up with—which might be a continuation of a character you began engaging with last week in LRRH or a new character altogether who is unrelated to that story. Both are totally welcome!
Let’s write characters!