When Third Is the Same as the First

On first blush, the difference between the I-voice and the omniscient voice appears to be a wide gulf. As with any aspect of storytelling, however, the approaches are bent toward some degree of union according to the dictates of each individual writer. If you grow comfortable with a character, you may come to see that the differences are barely distinguishable. You may choose that character to carry the entire narrative burden for you. This is known as third-person limited narration.

A hallmark of this style is how deeply inside a character’s thoughts the author probes. If Meghan launches into a full paragraph of how distressed she is after learning her father is gay and leaving the home, the pronoun “she” is virtually the same as the pronoun “I.” The two can appear interchangeably throughout the text, depending on how distinctive an author wants the thoughts to be.

Indeed, when authors are not getting inside a character’s head sufficiently, I enjoin them to write a passage initially in the first-person voice, then convert it to third- later. A find-and-replace of “I am” to “she is” may accomplish fifty percent of the conversion in one stroke. This process can be worked in reverse as well. This technique exposes times when the author’s hand is too heavy. When I read a sentence like “She thought her father was suffering from the workaholic ethos of his law partners,” I think, “Try pulling that off with ‘I thought . . .’” 

That narrative distance shows one of the primary pitfalls of the third-person limited voice. It is so easy for an author to make anything he wants to write into a character’s thoughts. This leads to the cardinal sin of telling rather than showing. The key to stopping such laziness is to avoid all telling of plot events and secondhand commentary within interior passages. Once the thoughts are divorced from exposition, they are free to roam where a person’s mind will. In the example above, for example, maybe she tells of one Sunday when she went into work with her father, only to be stranded for hours in a conference room. How did she feel with nothing to do, thinking about all the fun things she could be doing?

Where the author best intrudes is in summary work. You want to cover minor scene setting quickly, or want to denote a lapse in time. You pull back from the character’s intense gaze in order to avoid wasting the reader’s time during a bridge between scenes.

Exercise: Review the manuscript looking for interior monologues. If you are explicating plot, even of events that have already happened, stop to consider whether it should be converted into an action scene. Is it important enough for such treatment? If not, see if you can convert it into her feeling or opinion about the event.

Head Hopping

Let’s start with a basic truism: a reader desires to merge with the point-of-view character. We participate vicariously through that person’s actions and thoughts. During the course of a scene that process deepens. If you then jump to another person’s thoughts during the scene, though, the process is truncated. The reader is confused: why am I switching away? I liked being inside that point-of-view character’s head. 

If you are just starting off as a writer, you should be concerned for a more systemic reason. Writing in the omniscient voice is, frankly, much easier than writing in the I-voice. You can report about what the characters are doing rather than telling the story from within. The head hopping is just the most obvious indicator of how far away from inhabiting the character you are. 

You should be pushing yourself. Try limiting the number of points of view within a manuscript to roughly 3-4 tops. That way you get the multiple experiences, but all are viewed through a specific character’s prism. The reader can dig in with each one, even if she doesn’t like, say, the villain’s point of view. That revulsion then forces yourself to create a villain that the reader can understand, at least on some level—one with more complexity. 

Omniscient doesn’t mean lightweight. If you look at a great novel with multiple points of view like War and Peace, you will see that you empathize with each lead character, even though flighty Natasha couldn’t be more different from philosophical Pierre. That’s the bar you should set for yourself. You won’t achieve as much depth as you would with a single protagonist, but the reader is still wading in with each one right up to his neck.

Exercise: Examine the individual scenes in your manuscript. One character should rule the proceedings. This extends not only to actual thoughts but more subtle mental states as well. For example, “She wanted to consider . . .” is an interior state. You should make sure that any act of volition from a secondary character is indicated by physical means. 

Direct, Not Indirect

We all use shortcuts in writing. When we perceive a topic to be of lesser interest, we summarize it, treating it like a minor building block of the story. One way to do that is using indirect quotes. By not putting what is said into dialogue, you are relegating it to a passing mention. 

Indirect storytelling can, however, also be a sign of inexperience. It is much easier to report on a scene than inhabit the characters involved in it and tell it from the inside. Plus, we are all influenced by what we read, and a veteran writer often uses indirect speech—because she knows which pieces don’t merit more attention. Yet we may not realize the distinction when we sit down to write ourselves.

I’ll use a running example to show how relative weights should be assigned. “He told Annie he would be working late” works well in the context of a businessman engaged in an elaborate fantasy about an upcoming dinner with a sexy new client. In his mind at the time, making that tired excuse to his wife is an insignificant matter, and so it should be told that way.

Indirect is the wrong approach, though, when a plot event is crucial. Let’s say that later the husband has to tell his wife he had sex with the sexy client. That same indirect storytelling—“He confessed to Annie that he slept with the new client, and she broke down crying”—is utterly the worst way to engage the reader. What he tells her is not minor anymore. It may make or break his marriage. For that reason, the reader’s emotions will be deeply engaged if the scene is told in full, with dialogue throughout.

I should point out one other aspect of indirect storytelling. It can be a way for an author to shield himself from truths he’d rather not face. Writing is a process of exposing yourself. An author who writes about a cheating husband may in real life be faithful to his wife. So the indirect approach may be the author shying away from a subject that makes him uncomfortable. His wife, after all, may well be the first reader of the manuscript he’s writing. 

A large factor in determining dramatic importance is whether an action is being performed by the scene’s point-of-view character. Direct quotes increase the immediacy of prose, raising your major characters to more prominence. Indirect quotes tend to lower them.  So when a plot event is attached to someone the reader knows, crack open the nut and show what’s inside.

Exercise: If you decide that a passage should be heightened more by dialogue, you don’t have to write out an entire conversation. Sometimes a few lines of exchanged dialogue will provide the proper emphasis. If it needs more than that, add thoughts. In other words, you can calibrate how much you zoom in.

Ensemble Voices

A novel told through a wide assortment of characters allows the author greater scope to explore where the novel’s plot lines take him. Yet invariably I as a reader end up feeling less involved with the proceedings. I just can’t put my emotional stock in so many characters. To clarify, I am discussing a continuous narrative, not broken into Roshomon-like parts wherein each character discusses the same events from different points of view. 

I will point out several basic problems with the ensemble approach. First and foremost, it virtually guarantees that the story will be slighter in impact. How could it not? As a reader, rather than immersing yourself in one point of view, allowing that person to take over your own thought processes, you are jumping from one person’s head to another. I can make that switch with maybe one or two other characters, but even then I’m hoping that the protagonist will govern most of the scenes. Like any reader, I form a loyalty to the person who dominates the proceedings.

Second, an ensemble cast demands strong plotting. If character and plot are regarded as two ends on a balance scale, the more you feed into one, the less will be allotted for the other. If you are using a variety of characters to tell a story, that means that you are paying more attention to plot. The reader won’t delve as deeply into the characters, so the concomitant result is that more plot events are needed to entertain us. 

Third, setting up an ensemble cast will likely confuse readers during the opening segment of the book. We are looking for a story thread to follow, and if we keep on meeting new people, that thread is obscured by all the bustling about. Once a reader feels her emotions are being pulled in too many directions, she may put the book down.

The inherent emotional slightness of a tale told by an ensemble cast needs to be factored into your calculations when devising the initial outline. You need compelling plot events that consume your multiple characters. Further, you should avoid assigning really good material to a character the reader doesn't know well enough to care about. Otherwise, the book may be relegated to the label: busy but not good.

Exercise: Review the manuscript with a single character’s name in your global search window. Find which scenes he inhabits and write down what he does in a list of single-sentence entries. If he governs any scenes early on, the reader is given a signal to regard him as more important. Yet what happens to him later? If he is crowded aside by later developments to other characters, haven’t you left the reader hanging? Why did they spend so much time with that guy if he’s just going to drop out of the book?

Challenged from Without

The first-person observer voice seems like a wonderful choice for many writers first starting off. Writing in the I-voice allows instant access inside the narrator’s mind. The position of observer is a natural one for souls more given to reflection than argument. It seems like an ideal marriage of strengths.

Of the three main narrative voices (also first-person active and omniscient), this one is the most difficult to master. The implication is that the author need only find an interesting story, populated with colorful characters, to observe. The author adds in a heady brew of personal opinions, giving the narrative an individual flavor, and out comes a distinctive goulash.

Along the way, though, the narrator’s comfort in his armchair may become readily apparent. The font of witty opinions, expressing such a pointed view of the world, may be reduced to repetition after a while. Worse, the constant barrage may start to resemble nattering about a world that has become depressingly familiar. The parade of events and characters continues to be entertaining. So why do I feel the onset of ennui?

An impeccable novel, The Door by Hungarian writer Magda Szabó, provides an illuminating answer. Briefly, the story features Emerence, a cantankerous old maid, hired by a younger woman writer. The maid rips into the writer’s comfortable bourgeois lifestyle, continually levying pronouncements on what is just. You would think that the relationship of a woman and her maid is not exactly riveting material, but in fact it is the very relationship that makes all the difference.

That’s because the world being observed is relentlessly impinging on the comfort of the observer. The positions of mistress and maid are turned upside down. The observer is outraged, humiliated, baffled by turns. That armchair? The dog has already gnawed off one of its lion feet, and the seat is leaning precariously. There is no question who is driving the tension of the novel: it’s Emerence. Yet the observer remains interesting to the reader because her opinions have become deeply colored by the action.

Even better, the observer continues to not only probe the secrets of Emerence, but to evolve herself. This master-servant clash pits two people, with their panoply of emotions, on a collision course. Of course I want to keep reading. I want to stay inside the lives of these two women as they become inextricably bound. 

Exercise: When you are selecting the characters who will be observed, see if at least one of them can develop an intimate hold over the narrator. The more that character challenges the narrator, the more likely that the witty opinions will achieve a satisfying depth over the course of the book. As in any character arc, familiarity can breed knowledge of the human condition.

I Am Ordinary

Coupled with the need for interesting events in a first-person narration is the never-changing imperative of inhabiting an interesting protagonist. The reason the first-person narrative voice is so hard to do well is because the main character is not you. You can go ahead and tell us about your partners in your office suite, and what time each gets into work in the morning, but you should be prepared for the unsettling reality that your book may grow lonely on Amazon. Nobody cares about ordinary life. That’s why we pick up books, to escape our boring lives.

The same imperatives that govern the other narrative voices go double for the first-person. You need to exaggerate your characters, the situations they find themselves in, their reactions to plot turns. The extreme draws our interest, because we want to put ourselves in circumstances we would never dare navigate in real life.

As the first-person narrator, that means you have to write hyper from the inside out. The casual remark dropped to the reader might very well be deranged. You need to explain how you entered the apartment of a virtual stranger and found yourself smoking weed at eleven o’clock in the morning, as in Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City. Your main character may be notable precisely because she never seems to show up at her job. She’s too busy telling you about all the peculiar things that are happening to her. She doesn’t talk about gay people: she meets one dolled up in studs who is beating the crap out of a street preacher.

That’s the type of person you need to inhabit, and that’s hard work. You have to really stretch yourself to fill out, by way of analogy, your Macy’s parade balloon-sized character. Not just an underdog, but Underdog. Go all the way outside yourself. That way you can bring to us a tale that seems so familiar, it’s written in the first-person.

Exercise: Review your manuscript and be honest with yourself. Have you read this sort of material before? Do you find yourself yawning a little at that political commentary because you’ve heard it before on a TV news station? Instead, why don’t you let your character spike up his hair, add some blue? Now, take that guy out for a stroll.

Wandering Astray

Writing in the first-person voice is a seductive prospect for an author. The tone is so immediate, and spilling out the character’s thoughts comes so much more easily. What is less apparent is how hard it is for an inexperienced writer to control that narrative voice. Vibrancy of tone does not ensure a riveting read.

This caution applies especially to the writer who wishes to write organically. When you have only a vague idea of where the story is going, you can go too far afield in the thoughts the character has, at the expense of moving the story forward. The reasoning goes: Unlike a short story, a novel permits the space to expand on what interests the main character. As long as he is delivering insightful commentary on where he is, that’s good enough, right?

Delight in the ease of writing in the first person should be your first warning signal. Writing is hard, laborious, fretful work. A narrative point of view is only a way of telling a story. It does not replace the imperative to tell an interesting story. 

Your character may wander to Israel, say, but that does not mean that her observations on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will engross the reader. The power of Julius Caesar’s veni, vidi, vici depends on that third verb: conquer. Caesar came and saw, but he also did something about it. If your protagonist goes to Israel, she’d better get in up to her neck in trouble if you expect the reader to care less about her ruminations about ethnic relations.

An excuse I have heard on this topic reflects further confusion about this type of narration. Oh, but it is the first-person observer voice. I want the narrator to observe and comment. I won’t get into the extreme difficulty of mastering this variation of first-person narration. I’ll only point out that the other characters being observed have to be doing something interesting. And how, in the example above, is an American going to insinuate himself deeply enough into the intrigues of a foreign land to observe much of anything?

Let’s return to the starting point. The protagonist’s thoughts are a vital asset in putting the reader in her shoes. Yet unless you have the writing chops of Alain Robbe-Grillet, you’d better have a plot. You’d better have vivid characters around the protagonist that are causing her a lot of trouble. Sure, the reader wants to be along for the ride, but where are you going? 

Exercise: How can you tell how interesting your first-person narrative is? Take a scene and convert it into the omniscient voice. How does it work when told in the third-person? Forget about the loss of immediacy. Focus on the subject matter. Is what is happening grab you by the lapels, refusing to let go?

Stuck on a Flashpoint

Zeroing in on a significant detail deepens your prose. That principle makes intuitive sense, because a more exact verbal picture is more illustrative than a passing sketch.  Let’s take that idea one step further. How do you apply it in a way that will have the most emotional impact on the reader? Describing the pebbly corrosion on a rusty nail head is all well and good, but the reader isn’t going to be moved by it.

You can try lingering on an important detail. First consider a physical act, since that is closer to a description than a mental state. Let’s say Ted, in trying to find out why his law partner has been acting so strange lately, ends up in a back hallway of a bar. Out of the dark appears Bruno, who wants to warn Ted off by delivering a methodical beat-down.

You could give us a litany of all the dreadful blows Bruno deals out, but that’s not really going to move us. You have to expend so many words on describing actions that we likely know from many other books. Instead, bring the reader in fully by describing one source of excruciating pain. That dominates Ted’s thoughts above all other blows.

Maybe a shot to Ted’s stomach is so painful that he feels like the end of one of his ribs has been pulled out of its capsule. It feels like it is sticking right through his skin. Linger on that. What damage could the end of a bone do to Ted’s body in that region? Maybe he briefly recalls a childhood injury playing football, only this pain is much more agonizing. That gives the reader a reference point by which to gauge how much pain Ted is experiencing. The other punches can be described in passing, but remember, most people experience amnesia during an assault, so past a certain point those blows aren’t registering anyway.

This technique can be expanded beyond physical description. Let’s take the example of a conversation. While two women are exchanging gossip, your lead character, Madeline, can be struck by one thing her friend says. Sally is getting a divorce? As the conversation keeps running—because the friend has the dirt on absolutely everyone—Madeline is stuck on that one revelation. Maybe she just talked to Sally last week, and Sally didn’t say a thing to her about any trouble with Frank. Madeline might recall a picnic in which Sally was so happy with Frank, and the reason Madeline remembers is because that night she had unexpectedly great sex with her own husband. You can take advantage of the fact that Madeline doesn’t care about most of the people being discussed; the names pass in a blur. But you zero in on Sally because that divorce is going to impact Madeline later in the book. By focusing on the one, you can find a way to burrow inside your character.

Exercise: Review a scene that features a lot of information and/or action. What items have the most bearing on the novel as a whole? You can single that out with an eye for setting up events in the story’s future. You can also make up related stories that influence the character’s past. Out of the many emerges the one point you really want to make.

Singular Complaints

A good way to animate your lead characters from the inside is to explore a common mental loop that plays in all our heads.  As long as humankind has been in existence, we have always found things to complain about. So, if you want your characters to be realistic, wouldn’t they complain?

When you think of topics to kvetch about, a faceless behemoth will likely first come to mind: phone, cable, or insurance company. Yet that will hardly help your novel (unless it concerns a hurricane). The way a novel works, one character focuses on how he is affecting or is affected by another character. If you are writing about the human condition, a complaint is most successfully registered against another human being. 

You might start with the sentence: “She is always doing this to me.” If you identify a she, you’re already at the entrance of a rich mine. A mother is a common target of grievances, but it could be a sister, cousin, boss, anyone whose power over your character is strong enough to stir a deep emotional response. If you’re merely providing background information for a character, the target is only incidental in the novel. Yet what if she was one of the major characters? That means a lead character is complaining about someone the reader has gotten to know well. Now we’re all ears: come on, what are the things she does?

That is the next step. What is the reason for grumbling? The choice of topic is also strategic. If your character complains about his father’s preference for talking with perfect strangers rather than members of his family, we’re not only learning something about the father but the son as well. What does he do to capture his father’s attention? Or, has he given up on the problem and just stews about it? 

As in other fields of interior monologue, you can use other characters to focus the character’s mental peregrinations. When you choose a specific person and a specific topic, you can create a train of thought that mirrors how you complain about things. Start with “He drives me crazy,” and then list the reasons why. Pick the source and the subject of the complaint with an eye for what shines the most interesting light on the character complaining. You know how to bitch and moan. You do it every day. So employ it on your character’s behalf.

Exercise: If it helps, think about sitting down with a cocktail after work and complaining to your partner about what has happened that day or about who called today (about possibly an age-old complaint). If you’re really paying attention, turn on Siri when either you or your spouse go off on a rant. The cadence of that transcript may well be inserted into your manuscript.

The Value of Gossip

Writing is serious business. Sitting down at a desk entails a degree of solemnity akin to the grace achieved by monks. Gossip, on the other hand, is frivolous. So isn’t the title of this post a contradiction in terms? 

I’ll start with the example of Homer, the exemplar of oral storytelling. Where did he get all the tales that fill up The Iliad? Particular attention should be paid to the passages where Achilles is sulking in his tent, complaining to Patroclus. Can’t you imagine Homer standing at the tent flap, eavesdropping on that noble warrior?

That’s because gossip has existed since time immemorial. When you consider that people used to live in small villages, with so little access to entertainment, the arguments of a husband and wife next door provided a welcome break from banality. The affairs between secret partners required a special Commandment condemning them. On the flip side, most of us even today try to maintain placid exteriors to avoid prying eyes. A cellphone game is amusing, but come on, click out of that. Tell me what you think is going on with Harriet.

Everyone has dirty linen they want to hide, and as an author you have a duty to bring it out for the reader to view. The inside info on people is something we all enjoy, even guys. Why do you think the salacious discoveries of Alex Rodriguez’s steroid use blazoned headlines for months? Don’t try to tell me that had anything to do with playing baseball. 

Thinking in terms of gossip can be very helpful when you are trying to illuminate the personal side of your characters. What’s the juicy stuff that we, as readers, need to know? Try to think this way at all times: how are you toying with the reader’s desire to hear good gossip? You could make a case that the entire mystery genre is driven by this primal urge. Who was in whose bedroom when—and who was watching?

When this imperative is adopted, it forces an author to ask herself a question: what is so interesting about my main characters that they are worthy of gossip? Nobody passes along dull news. Your protagonist needs to have provocative qualities; she needs problems that a reader can pry her fingers into. Is her background worthy of gossip? That seems like such a strange question. But in fact it goes straight to the heart of the matter. Readers want entertainment, so what dirt do you got? 

Exercise: Review the manuscript for background passages. Are they sounding rather earnest, like the character is St. Joan of Arc about to mount her horse? Instead, ask yourself a simple question. Does the past information you’re providing pass the gossip standard? Would you tell this, behind a raised hand, to your best friend? If not, that character needs more dirt thrown on her. Give her enough so that she can wallow down in the mire with the rest of us. 

We Want Your Opinions

To a large extent, a good heroine has an opinion about everything. Depending on how outrageous they are or how many are unleashed, the character’s opinions may be the main draw of the book, especially in a mystery series. We want to find out what comment Terry is going to make next.

Contrast that with thoughts. You try to insert thoughts for a character who is in earnest pursuit of his goals, and what happens? Yawn. Readers assume, as a given, that a lead character wants to accomplish something during the course of the book. The real question is: are we are going to have fun along the way? If your hero makes swashbuckling remarks as he cleaves a path through his obstacles, we can vicariously enjoy them. If your heroine gives us the low-down on the people she has to deal with, we feel included, like we’re part of her set.

When you add opinions into your mix, a much larger goal can be attained as well. In order for your character to make opinions that are consistent with his personality, you have to think through them first: who is this person? Opinions add up to an attitude, and that is a prism through which your character can view everything that is taking place. So, you’re not just trying to come up with bon mots and witty repartee. You must create that entire attitude.

That only happens, however, when you reach beyond yourself. Think about it: would I want to read about a person who has ordinary opinions? Of course not. I get enough of those at the office. I’m drawn to someone who is larger than life. The opinions she sloughs off are not just scattered along the way. In order to be shocking, you have to inhabit the mind of the person who could come up with a remark like that in the first place. You must become the person making the comments. When the opinions are crackling, you’re in thrall—to the character brave enough to make them.

Exercise: Closely examine any scene you’ve written. Do you find that your character is merely an observer, telling us what other people are doing? The accurate camera lens? Forget that idea. Put a filter on that camera: try to make everything shocking pink, or true blue, or bilious yellow. What does your character have to say about what is happening?

The Power of the Boast

In your ongoing struggle to merge with a point-of-view character, you may want to try a hammer. Its name is: the boast. Why is it so powerful?

We all are delighted when a character in a book makes some outrageous claim about what he will do next. “He was going to fool all of them, every single last one.” Or, better, “I’m going to make their heads spin, just wait and see.” Such a claim can be made to another character or told directly to the reader. 

I should point out that the boast has to be direct in order for it to break through the barrier you’re experiencing. A statement like “He was going to devise a stratagem that would fool all of them” is still commentary by the author about the character. The claim has to come from inside: simple, blunt, irrefutable, even if the reader knows the character is dead wrong.

Narrative work like this accomplishes several important aims. First, readers love to participate in such claims. If Kim announces that she is going to break through the glass ceiling, we’re now curious to see how she will do it. Even more important, a boast puts you as the author on the firing line. You’re not commenting any longer; now you have to carry out the character’s claim. 

A boast can be a way that allows you to draw more exaggerated features for the character. He gains a swagger. He’s that outrageous guy, not the well-meaning pawn you chose originally. That kind of character can kick some ass. You can have fun writing about a character like that.

You can decide to insert a boast once every chapter, for starters. In how many chapters does that character appear? Take that number as your guide: you have to devise that many boasts. What are they going to be? Draw up a list of them, being scandalous every time. Fight the inner voice that says, “I’d never do something like that,” or “Nobody will believe that.” Go on, start writing the scene knowing you’re going to make that boast—and then make your character live up to it. In the process, you’ll have to live up to it too.

Exercise: A boast extends a natural personality trait of a character. When you are drawing up your list, think about what qualities you’d like to exaggerate. What kind of person would say that? Better yet, what would it take for you to say that? You’re not writing about the character any longer. You have to step forward with a run of your own thoughts that supports the boast. So, go on, be somebody else: be the character.

Scattershot Thoughts

Every writer has a rhythm to her prose, a cadence that she follows as the words flow out. Although the general trend over the past century has moved toward greater simplification, authors still employ great variety in sentence structure. Changes occur even with the same writer, such as Alice Munro, whose wonderfully layered prose of 30 years ago has eased into her crisp prose of today—without any loss of her unerring eye for the perfect detail. 

You can use this trend toward simplification to break through the outside-in approach to your characters. You can deliberately break apart your usual prose cadence. Whatever mode you’re comfortable with, you’re going to write not like that.

How do people think? They think in fragments. You may remind yourself: oh, I have to pick up . . . You never get to “the dry-cleaning” because you already know that. Thought left unfinished. You grab your keys and out the door you go. You can take advantage of this incompletion as a way to drive beyond the layer of superficial observations about the action happening at that time. You move beyond descriptions to sentence fragments. 

Here is an example of how you can use fragments to dig deeper and deeper, so that you feel you’re thinking just like the heroine: ‘The end of the last school year, it mattered to her that she break free of him. So she had done it.  Semi-done it, really.  And done it friendly-like. Friendly, so now she could ask this of him.  Get dirt on Don.”

There is nothing fancy about this prose, but we do know exactly what she’s thinking, because the sentence fragments provide comments on what she just thought, and then a comment on the comment. That’s the way we think, constantly refining thoughts until they suit our self-image. 

One terrific side effect of this deliberate practice is that the character’s thoughts will stand out more from the rest of the narrative. We’re following that nice prose cadence until we reach a segment of thoughts. The discontinuity stands out in contrast. A reader can more readily participate, because your character is saying: I’m not smooth and unapproachable. Come on in!

Exercise: Review the manuscript for thoughts of your main character. Pick out those that are an immediate comment on a piece of plot action. Try to break that single sentence into several sentence fragments. Don’t just deliver a pronouncement on the character’s mood. Give us the first burst, then a consideration of that thought, then a further interpretation of that thought, getting it just right.

All the World’s a Stage

I came across a quote the other day that stopped me short: “He was less of an actor than any man I ever saw.” I focused on the word “actor,” struck by how it applies so well to a novel’s characters. The truth is, we all have multiple facets in our makeup that we turn off and on at will. I’m not talking about Sybil and her 16 personalities. This observation applies to the way that we adopt a persona to fit the circumstances. If you’re in a job interview, you’re going to be earnest and likable. If you’re leaving a tedious dinner engagement, you’re going to be cutting and irreverent. Same person but different prompt and different listener.

So why can’t you do that with your characters? You want them to be multilayered. The principal way that Sam, say, operates might be: he’s an enthusiastic extrovert. He likes to champion causes, to mingle with people, to persuade them of his convictions. Yet who is Sam when he is alone on a Sunday morning? How does he cope with the slings and arrows we all endure? 

When you ask yourself those questions, a different dynamic starts to unfold. Sam might have some deep, dark reasons why he is so affable. If you (1) investigate what they might be for your own knowledge and (2) tell the reader a background story or two, now his confident perch could be much more unsteady. He has to fight to be confident. That deep, dark nature could threaten to overthrow the good in him—and then where would the novel be? 

In other words, you create tension within the character, and that makes the reader nervous. We all fear being exposed for the embarrassing things we’ve done. Better yet, the secret things we’re doing right now, the illicit longings that we have, ones even our partner doesn’t know about. The reader can come to worry that the dark side will usurp the confident side. To create a rising character arc, you can show a series of incidents where the dark side is progressively winning. You know how to do that, of course, because you have identified what that other personality is. 

Example: Try an experiment. Go to an airport and watch all of the confident types that strut through the terminal. Better yet, sit down in a food court and watch them while they’re eating and checking out other people. What are they afraid of betraying? When you see a furtive look, jot it down and imagine what the back story behind that look is. Better yet, write down a list of possible reasons and then play out the string on each one. Everyone appears to be so confident—because they’re acting. 

So Serious

Except for those authors wishing to be satiric, characters in a novel pursue their aims purposefully. A writer wants to mount tension in a romantic scene, or aims for discouragement after an untoward plot event. Yet what happens if, while you are reviewing the manuscript, the lead character feels dull? I know that while I’m editing, I can find myself thinking: “This character is so earnest.” 

If you experience that, you need to ask: how you would react in real life? Except in the most dire circumstances, don’t you find yourself thinking, or commenting sotto voce to a friend, some humorous remark that you know is totally inappropriate? You can cry or you can laugh. Life is a beach. A sardonic observation or two will not undercut a serious subject to the extent that it is damaging.

You can consciously employ this attitude while exploring what your main character(s) is thinking. Instead of a dutiful recitation of how verbally abusive your father was when you were sixteen, write the passage from an ironic point of view. Poke fun at your memory. Try to insert a few wry observations, as though you were retelling the story to a close friend. Your friend isn’t going to put up with you taking yourself so seriously. Plus, you want to be entertaining, even if the memory is truly painful. 

So you make light of it. After all, everybody knows that the more grueling an experience is, the better the story it makes later. Why aren’t you doing that when you write? Aren’t you trying to entertain the reader? 

Better yet, use multiple points of view during the telling. We do it all the time. I can’t tell you how often I catch myself thinking: “You’d better not . . .” when the “you” refers to myself. I have an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. Why can’t you employ that from inside a character’s head? Tell us what you fired back at your father, but then insert a wry comment of how you’d feel if your daughter fired that back at you. 

You see, the problem with earnest is that it’s a barrier between you and your character. You’re trying to depict what George down there on the paper is doing, and that’s serious business. But don’t you think George knows that? Does George sit around all day quoting Kant to himself? Lighten up. And watch your character sparkle with all the contradictory stuff bubbling inside you.

Exercise: Review the manuscript for interior monologues that are at least a paragraph long. Read the material through a first time, not allowing yourself to write anything. Then go back through, looking for places to inject commentary, just the way you would if you were bantering with your best friend. Don’t overdo it; a little goes a long way. Then the next day, see if you feel you’re connecting better with the character.

Where I Shouldn’t Be

Shame can be a compelling way to ensure a reader’s rapt attention. When a character is engaged in activities that provoke embarrassment, or even only potential humiliation, the reader can’t bear to look away from the page. All you need is a situation in which you know the character is being outrageous or combative or prowling about in places he ought not to be.

For example, Andre Dubus III’s novella Listen Carefully features a husband who is trying to understand why his wife of many years would leave him for another man. As part of his off-kilter responses, he wanders through the home they used to share—and that the reader knows is forbidden to him. As a reader you almost want to shout, “Get out of there before she comes home!” But the character is going to do no such thing, because the author knows he has us right where he wants us.

How do you make this premise work? Part of the technique consists in setting up a social situation in which the character can be shamed. That context can be as slight as a teenage girl walking into a party filled with classmates that she knows look down on her, determined to confront a boy who has done her wrong. No matter what the circumstances, you stir interest simply by creating countering forces that make us cringe.

Another key factor in making such a sequence work is the character’s motivation. Why is that girl so determined to tell the boy off? What did he do to her? What type of person is she that she would brave the lions’ den? Does she normally flip people off, or has she been driven to extremes by what he did? You can see from just these possible variables how gripping the scene would be. 

If she regularly chews people out, then the embarrassment factor is lessened. She obviously has a thick skin. If she is shy, on the other hand, and she feels she must make her views known, now we’re starting to feel squeamish. Even better, the power of her motivation is driving not only the character but the entire plot forward. We are carried along by her desire. 

Finally, it is important to rub the reader’s face in the shame. That entails providing minutely observed details and interior monologues that overtake the reader thoroughly. You want to linger as long as possible. Drag it out, don’t let the reader escape. You may well find that the emotional tide you’ve created carries you to a higher plane throughout the rest of the story.

Exercise: Check your manuscript for scenes featuring confrontation. Is your protagonist confident, strident, sure of the rightness of his cause? If so, ask yourself if the circumstances might be altered so that his standing with the other person(s) is more tenuous. Could he be humiliated? Even if he is confident, is it possible to alter the other character’s response in an unexpected fashion that leaves the protagonist humiliated?

All the Little Decisions

One practical step toward character immersion is: slow down. This might be likened to the progress of a turtle (no, not Steinbeck’s). Turtles move slowly, but they have plenty of opportunity to take in all they see.

The first step is: don’t automatically link characters’ thoughts to plot events. That is a major reason you’re not connecting mentally with the character. Instead, you need to imagine the plot event you’re about to write—and then ask yourself: what is my character thinking at each step of the way, second by second? This is difficult because, by and large, the character is doing stuff you’d never do. So how are you going to work up an interior monologue about issues you know nothing about? 

First, focus on little decisions we all make every day. Pick an issue related to a character that is close to Molly. Let’s say her husband has always had an insider track, guy with guy, with her middle son, Phil. They have an instinctive connection that makes Molly feel left out in the cold, even though Phil needs her so much in other ways. If that sort of notion appeals to you, you can write out Molly’s gripes and/or acceptance in a paragraph. What do Phil and his father talk about? Why does Phil need her? That might lead to her thoughts on their other children, or with her brother- and/or sister-in-law. If they are models for characters in your book, Molly’s thoughts would serve at the very least as a good opening description of them. 

By writing about what you know, you’re wedding the mental loops you think about every day to your story. Your training to capture the neurotic chain of stuff you know very well can, in time, lead to spinning out thoughts related to material you don’t know a thing about. That’s because by that time you’re used to writing down what skips around in your mind.

Exercise: As you walk around the house, or shower, or lie awake in bed at night, have a pocket notepad or phone handy to take down a chain of nattering thoughts. You’ll probably only be able to capture the first sentence or two before the wellspring runs dry. But you can save that start for your next writing session. Then see if you can unspool out its natural coil to a paragraph or two.

 

Live in the Moment

The distance between an author and their lead character(s) is revealed most clearly during scenes containing heightened action. Possible sources of the drama have a wide range, from bullets flying to a family member caught in a lie. No matter what your choice is, an action scene is often a missed opportunity. Told from a distance, it can be a hurried account in which the exciting events seem to fly by. Yep, they happened, but they didn’t grab the reader, because the author didn’t put enough details down on the page where a reader can experience it.

Let’s take an example, featuring a female PI in a graveyard. When the villains show up, they are summarily dispatched: “She swung out from the side of her headstone and felled the boss ape with a double tap to the heart. His partner took aim at her and blew a large chunk of marble from the stone she’d ducked behind again. She rolled to the other side and took him out with two headshots.” 

Now, as a reader, how am I able to participate in that? I have no idea what the woman is feeling as she peeks her head out from behind the gravestone the first time. I don’t sense that she fired her gun twice—don’t guns recoil, for instance? Although I was told previously that the villains shined their pickup’s headlights in her direction, I don’t sense that she sees the villains in silhouette. Plus, what’s her reaction to the chunk of stone flying off the headstone? Doesn’t any of it hit her? And how does she know to appear on the other side of the stone? Do they teach that in PI training camp? In other words, I’m left out of the proceedings because the author is imagining That Person Out There rather than inhabiting her lead character.

When you have heightened action, you want to dwell in it. You want to record every second that passes. I mean that literally. Among all the options, think of what she is hearing—because she can’t look to see very often. She knows she has to fire her gun. How does it feel in her hands? How many clips does she have, and could she take the time to reload? In other words, focus down on the moment. 

In the same fashion, record all those fleeting thoughts of the lead character that bring us inside his head. How did these guys know how to find him in a cemetery? Where did he screw up? Who was he talking to recently? Plus, research fight and flight reactions. Or, step back and think about what such a crisis could reveal to the character about himself. 

That paragraph in the cemetery? I would expand it to 3-4 times its present length. Think about all the details that could have been included. The longer the reader lives within the tension, the more emotional impact it will have. So, take your time once your knives are sharpened.

Exercise: Using all five senses can help in fully creating an action scene. Too much emphasis is usually placed on sight, and that might be considered last. I mentioned sounds before, but smells can also provide telling details. The intimate details of touch and taste, such as dry mouth, can bring the reader right inside the character. Write down a list of four types of sensations other than sight. 

Inward, Not Onward

As the old adage goes, a person’s true character is revealed in a crisis. That’s a boon for a writer, because a novel is a highly compressed period of crises in a character’s life. The plot events are designed to demonstrate the person’s qualities (showing, not telling). All of these statements are uncontroversial matters of fact. Yet you have to ask yourself: are you getting the maximum impact from the crises you devise?

I’ll focus on the most common crisis in fiction, a death. A hole in the novel’s universe is ripped open and it must be repaired. Many beginning writers are industrious about weaving plot threads that spin off that event, trying to create red herrings and the like that keep the game of reading delightful. What they neglect to their peril, however, is how the crisis affects their lead character.

Why do you think so many of the murders in fiction happen to close relatives of the protagonist? The death opens a portal into a hero’s emotions. Anyone who has experienced the death of a loved one knows that grief strikes in inexplicable waves of sorrow. The bereft one feels the black hole as an almost tangible entity, the gap of nothingness that will never be filled. He remembers times he shared with the deceased person, how good they were.  

So, before you trundle off on your merry schemes that could just as easily unfold if sorrow didn’t occur, you might want to ask yourself: how am I going to get the reader to identify with my heroine in her time of crisis? After all, identification with a lead character is a huge part of what sells books. You might want to write a few background stories that involve her and the dead person, filtered through the glass of grief-stricken reflection. You might want some spots of deep funk when she really doesn’t want to get out of bed. We are not Energizer bunnies, so why should your protagonist be?

When a lead character is not related to the dearly beloved, how is a crisis constructed for him? Usually what you find is that he has a personal issue of another sort, one that plagues him throughout the novel, such as a terrible past deed. Again, that conundrum opens a window into his feelings. We can crawl through that opening and nestle inside. Rather than a bunny, he is a lumbering bear prone to bouts of melancholy. In other words, just like us. 

Exercise: Take advantage of what you know about times of sorrow in your own life. One reason Tolstoy’s novels are so great is that both of his parents were dead by the time he was nine years old. You too have suffered losses, and you can likely transfer your personal experiences to create character depth.

Answering the Why

As a writer starts a story, objective facts tend to emerge first. A passage can describe how a teenager gets from here to there: say, hurrying from the front door to the family car and out the driveway. While the details may be precise, such as the slate front steps, the facts don’t evoke how the character experiences what he is doing. Instead, you need to focus on the why.

Start by examining what facts are being told. Rather than describing how the teenager walks, opens the car door, etc., focus on the situation. A teenager hurrying to a car is not operating in a void, but within a context of his relationships with other characters. Why is he hurrying—in personal terms? Is he afraid that his mother will appear at the front door and countermand her permission to let him use the car? If so, what does that say about the mother? Is she overly strict? Do his friends always laugh at him because she is so strict? And what about the dad? Why does he allow the mother to browbeat her son? You could, of course, turn the question on its head. What has the teenager done in the past with the car that makes her afraid of his driving it that night?

All of this information can be imparted by using this seemingly trivial scene as a way to show what the character is like. The walking, opening the car door, etc., is flat. The need to get the hell out of the house is involving. 

If the boy is afraid of his mother’s changing moods, you can anchor what type of relationship they have by describing her. Is she wearing a business suit or a housecoat? Is she drinking gin or herbal tea? What about a sentence to describe the father, standing in the background of the mother-son interchange? You can move on, once the young man is settled in the car, to describe his get-up for his night out. Is he wearing an alligator shirt or a badge of Megadeath? What, since appearances are so important to teenagers, does he feel about his clothes? How much has his mother allowed him to get away with?

You are taking objective facts and imbuing them with subjective value. Clothes do make the man, so you can take advantage of that. Transform a pedestrian description of getting from here to there to charge the narrative with interpersonal dynamics. And, by the way, skip all the words describing the here-to-there. You’ve entered a new realm entirely, the one where novelists live.

Exercise: Begin by finding long paragraphs in your manuscript. Those are the ones ripe for converting from outward to inner. Do you see a lot of physical descriptions? Pick out one or two and ask: why is the character doing this? What meaning can I derive from the way the two major characters react to each other in the passage? Can I draw out meaning that has lasted for a long time? Stop for a short paragraph to tell us why they have never gotten along.