Deeper than a Puddle

I've been writing about how to write in a more literary fashion.  Once critical thing that sets stories that are more literary apart from those that aren't is characters.  As many have said, story IS character.  Without deep and fascinating characters, a story falls flat.  If it weren't for the flawed yet noble characters of Scout, her father, and Boo Radley, To Kill a Mockingbird would never have hit must-read status in English classrooms for decades.  If Emma and Eliza Bennett were just one-note, sappy Mary Sues, readers wouldn't be craving Jane Austen's novels so long after they were written.  I wrote my bachelor's thesis on The Scarlet Pimpernel and its sequels.  Baroness Orczy's novels straddle that edge between true literature and pop lit by incorporating several themes and issues that make literature work, yet avoiding, among other things, this one major item: depth of character.  As a consequence, most people don't even realize there were sequels, and few people will ever read them for an English class.  Most people's exposure to the stories springs from movies or the Broadway musical.  If you want to write in a literary fashion, it's critical to write characters that have depth and motivation.  

But what makes a character deep?  Whether you're thinking about your protagonist, a main character, a background character, an antagonist, or someone else, a deep character is one with clear yet complicated motivation.  If your hero only wants the good of all mankind and will stop at nothing to champion it, you're writing a Gary Stu or Mary Sue, a character so perfect, he/she's unrelatable and flat.  Whether I'm reading about a barbarian set on world domination or a little boy who wants to save his mom from disaster, I want it to be made clear at some point what drives him to want what he wants.  I want to feel for him on some level, even if I can't love or root for him.  

Many authors do this through a character system like the Enneagram.  It is a system used by many to understand themselves and humanity around them.  If it can be used to understand humanity, it can also be used to imitate humanity through characterization.  This typing system comes ready with motivations, relationships with others, and depth built in.  Say you know your character tends to be stuffy and rigid, but inside, she is only trying to control the chaos she feels constantly creeping in.  You go through the titles and realize she's a perfectionist, also called a reformer or one of several other versions of the same concept.  You can then find out what makes a perfectionist/reformer tick, what drives them, what scares them, what brings them joy, how they relate to other characters, etc.  You just figure out roughly what your character is like, and you let this system do the rest.  

A really brief and superficial thumbnail sketch is as follows: 1. A perfectionist/reformer is motivated by faithfulness to his internal rules; 2. A befriender/helper is motivated by being liked and needed; 3. A performer/ achiever is driven by the desire to impress and to seek success; 4. An artist/individualist is motivated by emotions and the desire to feel unique; 5. A thinker/investigator is motivated by a thirst for knowledge and their own inner world; 6. A loyalist is driven by their desire for security and comfort and their devotion to a person or a cause; 7. A thrillseeker/enthusiast is driven by their desire to stay busy and have fun; 8. A chief/challenger is driven by their desire to control others and the world around them; 9. A peacemaker is driven by their desire to get along and avoid change.  There is much more to it than these brief thumbnails.  To find out more, click on the link above.  One person is rarely just one type.  They usually share characteristics of the types around them, also called wings.  

Let's say you decide to create a businessman who yearns for success.  You say, "There he is!  He's clearly a 3, a performer/achiever.  You study up on that and decide if he's a helper achiever, one who likes to make personal connections and be friends with those around him as he fights his way to the top, or if he's more a reformer achiever, one who is ruled by his staunch code of ethics as he does so.  You then read up on both and see how the two types you choose affect each other.  This is an incredibly useful tool for characterization, even if you're just making a quick side character because those ought to have motivations as well if they are to have any impact on the story line.  

Now, you try it.  What is your main character like?  Which type fits him/her most?  Now, go find out more about what makes your character tick.  And what makes him/her different or special.  No two thinker artists will be exactly the same.  See if you can write a scene with two thinker artists who argue because they agree on nothing.  And enjoy.  

Liar Liar Pages on Fire

I've been writing about ways any piece of writing can become more literary.  One literary technique some writers use to great effect is the unreliable narrator.  This is where the writer makes clear that the reader can't trust what the narrator says.  The Nownovel linked to in this paragraph points out that this is because "the point of view character is insane, lying, deluded or for any number of other reasons." It often works best with first-person narrators.  Since writing in a literary fashion is about making meaning, much meaning can be made in that gap between what the narrator says and reality. 

Many acclaimed novels have been written with a clear gap between the narrator's perspective and that of the author.  Gone Girl, for instance, won awards for using this technique to good effect.  The reader is forced to be the detective in a murder mystery to figure out what really happened, what the truth is.  As the Shmoop article linked to above says, in Gone Girl, "We (as readers) are positioned between two—or three—intensely unreliable narrators, and when they speak to us directly, we are implicated in their drama, dragged into the fight so it feels like our two main characters are fighting over us, desperately trying to get us to take sides."  Poe's Telltale Heart also monopolized on a narrator that could not be entirely trusted to describe reality as the reader may understand it since the narrator is clearly insane.  

My favorite unreliable narrator yarn I've read recently was Shannon Hale's Ever after High Book 3 in which the narrator, one who strives for an old-school 3rd person omniscient goes insane due to events of the story and has to be replaced by increasingly nutty and unreliable characters, first daughter of the Mad Hatter, who is clearly biased and somewhat silly, then daughter of the Cheshire Cat, who blatantly makes things up because she's bored.  I write my cat's blog with this kind of unreliable narrator, wherein other figures in the narration jump in to correct the narrator's exaggerated and self-aggrandizing descriptions.  

The Nownovel article linked to above also points out a danger in this kind of narrator.  "Readers do not always understand that a narrator is not the final voice of truth and authority. They may even confuse the narrator with the author." Be careful to cue the reader in either gradually or all at once to the fact that the narrator cannot be trusted.

You as an author can choose many techniques to show that gap.  One is to show the truth via other characters or events in the story.  If you show what happens then have the narrator describe it or have your narrator describe the events and another character or characters correct or react to the narrator in a way that cues the reader into the fact that the narrator cannot be trusted.  If a narrator is caught in their embellishments somehow, that's another way.  For instance, if the narrator somehow is forced to correct him/her self, that would show they're not very reliable.  Another way is simply to have the narrator be so over-the-top in his or her own descriptions, especially when it comes to something with which most readers would have experience, the reader would be cued into the fact that they can't take the narration at face value.  Now that you know this kind of narrator exists, try using it in a short piece to practice.  Where may you be able to use this elsewhere?