Post by Joe Snack Road on Aug 7, 2005 15:30:22 GMT -5
Taken from the textbook "What If? - College Edition - Second Edition, Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers" by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter...
Chapter 28 - What Do Your Characters Want?
In her superb book Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway stresses the importance of knowing what characters want:
Sometimes, want is expressed in terms of need, wish, hope, etc. - and it is amazing how many times these words appear in the first two pages of stories.
In the Gabriel Garcia Marquez story "No One Writes to the Colonel," a colonel has been waiting for a certain letter for almost sixty years. As a young man, he had taken part in a successful revolution and, afterward, the government had promised him and other officers travel reimbursement and indemnities. The colonel's whole life has been a matter of marching in place and waiting ever since. Even though he has hired a lawyer, filed papers, written endlessly and seen laws passed, nothing has happened. The lawyer notes that no official has ever taken responsibility. "In the last fifteen years, there have been seven Presidents, and each President changed his Cabinet at least ten times, and each Minister changed his staff at least a hundred times." The colonel says, "All my comrades died waiting for the
l" - but he refuses to give up, even though his life has been wasted and he has grown older, sicker, and crankier in the course of time.
The want that gives dynamic force to the story can take the form of a strong emotion, or an obsession, such as the colonel's determination to have his place in history recognized (probably his real motive); or it can be expressed in some specific plan or scheme.
Henry James's novel The Wings of the Dove is a good example of an elaborate scheme. Kate Croy, a London woman, knows that her one-time acquaintance Milly Theale, a rich and charming American, is dying of a mysterious disease. The doctors think that Milly's only chancefor recovery lies in finding happiness - such as that of falling in love. Kate's scheme is to have her lover, Merton Densher, woo and marry Milly, inherit her money when she dies, and then marry Kate.
In Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby's whole ambition is to recover the past - specifically, the idyllic time of his love affair with Daisy Buchanan years before.
Sometimes an ostensible want hides of overlays a greater one. Robert Jordan in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls intends to blow up a bridge to halt the advance of Franco's fascist troops. But as he waits for the strategic moment, an underlying desire to experience the life of Spain and identify with the Spanish people emerges as his real want.
Lislie Epstein's King of the Jews offers the reader an enigmatic mixture of purposes. I.C. Trumpelman, the Jewish puppet-leader whom the Nazis install as head of the ghetto, wishes to preserve his people from the Holocaust - but he also has a drive to rule, dictate to, and rule them.
Wants in fiction aren't always simple and straight forward things, just as peoples' motives are seldom unmixed. The more complicated and unsuspected - both to her and to us - are a protagonist's aims, the more itneresting that character will be and the more interesting will be the unfolding of her story.
The Exercise
Look at the stories you've already written and ask
- What does the central character want?
-What are her motives for wanting this?
-Where in the story is this made clear to the reader?
-How do we learn what the central character wants? Dialogue? Actions? Interior thinking?
-What or who stands in the way of her achieving it?
-What does that desire set in motion?
If you don't know the answers to these questions, you don't know your character and her desires as well as you should. Aristotle said, "Man is his desire." What your central characters desire will inform the situations ultimately the elements of the plots in which they are involved.
The Objective
To understand how your central character's desire shape her life. To see characterization as more than description and voice and mannerisms.
Chapter 28 - What Do Your Characters Want?
In her superb book Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway stresses the importance of knowing what characters want:
It is true that in fiction, in order to engage our attention and sympathy, the central character must want and want intensely. The thing the character wants need not be violent or spectacular; it is the intensity of the wanting that counts. She may want only to survive, but if so she must want enormously to survive, and there must be distinct cause to doubt she will succeed.
Sometimes, want is expressed in terms of need, wish, hope, etc. - and it is amazing how many times these words appear in the first two pages of stories.
In the Gabriel Garcia Marquez story "No One Writes to the Colonel," a colonel has been waiting for a certain letter for almost sixty years. As a young man, he had taken part in a successful revolution and, afterward, the government had promised him and other officers travel reimbursement and indemnities. The colonel's whole life has been a matter of marching in place and waiting ever since. Even though he has hired a lawyer, filed papers, written endlessly and seen laws passed, nothing has happened. The lawyer notes that no official has ever taken responsibility. "In the last fifteen years, there have been seven Presidents, and each President changed his Cabinet at least ten times, and each Minister changed his staff at least a hundred times." The colonel says, "All my comrades died waiting for the
l" - but he refuses to give up, even though his life has been wasted and he has grown older, sicker, and crankier in the course of time.The want that gives dynamic force to the story can take the form of a strong emotion, or an obsession, such as the colonel's determination to have his place in history recognized (probably his real motive); or it can be expressed in some specific plan or scheme.
Henry James's novel The Wings of the Dove is a good example of an elaborate scheme. Kate Croy, a London woman, knows that her one-time acquaintance Milly Theale, a rich and charming American, is dying of a mysterious disease. The doctors think that Milly's only chancefor recovery lies in finding happiness - such as that of falling in love. Kate's scheme is to have her lover, Merton Densher, woo and marry Milly, inherit her money when she dies, and then marry Kate.
In Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby's whole ambition is to recover the past - specifically, the idyllic time of his love affair with Daisy Buchanan years before.
Sometimes an ostensible want hides of overlays a greater one. Robert Jordan in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls intends to blow up a bridge to halt the advance of Franco's fascist troops. But as he waits for the strategic moment, an underlying desire to experience the life of Spain and identify with the Spanish people emerges as his real want.
Lislie Epstein's King of the Jews offers the reader an enigmatic mixture of purposes. I.C. Trumpelman, the Jewish puppet-leader whom the Nazis install as head of the ghetto, wishes to preserve his people from the Holocaust - but he also has a drive to rule, dictate to, and rule them.
Wants in fiction aren't always simple and straight forward things, just as peoples' motives are seldom unmixed. The more complicated and unsuspected - both to her and to us - are a protagonist's aims, the more itneresting that character will be and the more interesting will be the unfolding of her story.
The Exercise
Look at the stories you've already written and ask
- What does the central character want?
-What are her motives for wanting this?
-Where in the story is this made clear to the reader?
-How do we learn what the central character wants? Dialogue? Actions? Interior thinking?
-What or who stands in the way of her achieving it?
-What does that desire set in motion?
If you don't know the answers to these questions, you don't know your character and her desires as well as you should. Aristotle said, "Man is his desire." What your central characters desire will inform the situations ultimately the elements of the plots in which they are involved.
The Objective
To understand how your central character's desire shape her life. To see characterization as more than description and voice and mannerisms.
No man consciously chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for the happiness that he seeks.
-Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly
-Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly