Emergent Properties of Characters

(Picture from here.)

"Character is what you are in the dark."

So says Doctor Emilio Lizardo ably played by John Lithgow in Buckaroo Banzai.

Of the things that are important to me in writing, I have to say character rises to the top. Prose is nice. Plot is good. Imagery is key. But, to me, it revolves around the nature of the participants in the story-- that is, to say, character.

There are inherent issues with understanding characters in story that are not often addressed. The first one is who knows what is going on? The second is who's telling the story? Following from these two is, who's going to tell the reader?

These only appear to be trivial questions.

In SF and fantasy stories there is always the problem of getting the world across to the reader. Often referred to affectionately as the expository lump, for the smooth way it must be swallowed. Consider your own world-- this blog, for example. Say a person from ancient Hyperborea (Boston in the 1970's) appears. You have to explain the internet, cell phones, twitter, etc., to him-- things you would never ordinarily think about because they are part of your world. In fact, in a story, you would absolutely require such an ignorant individual to provide an opportunity to explain the internet, cell phones, etc. This is true for any milieu sufficiently different from the milieu of the reader.

Different writers have handled this in different ways. Some put up a lump. Some hit the ground running and hope the reader will stay with them long enough to explain. (Neal Stephenson does this.) Some twist the environment to make it sufficiently like the reader's (or at least a piece of the reader's) world that no explanation is necessary. Some pander to a perceived truth of the milieu to tell the story trusting the legend will trump actual history. (Amadeus does this.) But, win, lose or draw, if you don't tell the reader directly you're going to need a character to show things.

Hence the first question: Who knows what's going on? Every story has a mystery to unfold and only the characters can know enough to impart it to the reader-- you as the author know it all. But unless you're Puck, you're not telling.

The second question is who's telling the story?

Every story has voice and that voice belongs to someone. You can lie and say it's the author but that's blowing smoke. No author writes the same book twice-- not if that author is worth a damn. For one thing, the act of writing the book changes the author. For another, it must be decided who are the focal characters, what must be left out, what is left in-- these are choices the author must make. Often, it's not the story teller that knows what is going on-- think The Great Gatsby. The narrator knows almost nothing. Think Huckleberry Finn. The reader knows more about what is going on than Huck. Huck sees all but understands little. The storyteller determines what can be revealed and how it must be revealed.

Which leads us to the final, and I think, most important question: who's going to tell the reader?

Let's rephrase the question to make it clearer: How is the reader going to know what is going on? In Huckleberry Finn, Huck knows what happens but understanding is left to the reader to learn-- understanding beyond what Huck is capable of. In HF, Jim is a fully formed man, with wants and needs, with children and a wife. He knows this. The reader can see it. But Huck has to be brought to that revelation.

There's a common flaw in a lot of fiction where a given character knows more than he should. Or suddenly starts talking about something that by all rights is part of the room's furniture. How often do you talk about how light switches work? Yet, in some stories, people talk about the equivalent of "light switches". It's as if the characters are schizophrenic, part of their own world and part of ours and switch between them at the author's necessity.

Remember Lizardo: "Character is what you are in the dark." The nature of the characters in a story is not limited to how they act on stage. In order to be true characters, they have families, lives, ancestors, dreams and ambitions when they are off the stage as well as when they are on the stage. The person that they are when the spotlight hits them has to be congruent with the person that exits stage left.

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Wall of Idiots
Rep. Alfred Baldasaro (R, NH)

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