Character

For the last thirty years I’ve worked diligently to sharpen my skills as a writer. I’ve been pondering this week about how the current political discourse would never be considered by a fiction publisher for at least three reasons.

First, if readers can accurately anticipate an action, then the character would never be a main one in a novel. Characters who act in a one-dimensional manner might be worked into a story for a specific role in the plot, but they would always be third tier. Good fiction requires life-like characters, folks who sometimes act in ways that betray who they claim to be, folks who say “out-of-character” things that don’t fit with what is known in the moment.

Second, readers would reject novels where the main character always characterized antagonists in a truncated manner. To reduce an opposing character to a one-word descriptive name does not show reality, just a stillborn perception. Since readers would never buy such an anemic novel, literary agents would not represent an author who used undeveloped characters and a publisher would transfer such a manuscript from the slush pile to the dumpster.

Third (and this may be further development of number two), successful novels always have a “cast of characters,” a diverse group of personas where the varied qualities create tension and conflict in the plot. A skilled writer develops characters so that what the folks do emerges directly from who they are. Using multi-dimensional protagonists and antagonists allows a writer to avoid plot holes in telling a story. A complicated and conflicted cohort creates an infinite supply of turns and twists that make stories engaging. This includes an abject avoidance of group think. If everyone in a story thinks the same way, if everyone sounds like a single writer drafted the monologues, then the story will forever be mired in the mud and will never soar. You’d never see that in a novel high on the sales list on Amazon. Kristen Lamb said, “The key to creating better plots rests in a deeper understanding of character.” Could it be that in the political discourse of 2020 we could expect better policy and action through a robust, multi-dimensional attention to character?