Some difficult ideas are presented by other writers, either up close and personal, in a collaborative workshop, or on the page during an essay or interview, and these thoughts may be in direct opposition to one’s own beliefs, needing time to settle into a more comfortable place of acceptance or at least a wary coexistence. Other opposing thoughts may, of course, be rejected outright; but there are very few that seem to state a conflicting philosophy that set off a flash in one’s mind that blazes with a truth we instantly embrace. At least, that’s so for my ordinarily obstinate brain, confident in the strength of its own convictions.
One of my long-cherished views was contained in the knowledge that the characters in my novels spoke a language of my own; my concerns, beliefs, morality came through their discourse, either with each other or introspectively. Please note the use of the past tense here, was contained. The March 2nd 2014 interview in the New York Times with Philip Roth titled My Life as a Writer exploded that theory with the clarity of his truth that, “The novel, then, is in itself his [the author’s] mental world.”
What did that mean—‘in itself’? He was very clear at the beginning of his answer, and that’s what set me back on my imaginative heels. How many blog pieces have I done on the subject of character? Too many to go back and count. Why? Because I always believed that’s where the author’s thought was made manifest. Put my words in their mouths, my passions in their breasts, and let them tell of the truths I want to present. I well remember Elizabeth Strout answering a question about forming her characters by saying she tried to convince herself she wasn’t recreating herself over and over, but to no avail. How true, I thought. Meet my characters and you’ve met me. Get to know them and you know me. Not according to Roth, and it’s taken me no time at all to accept that he’s right.
“Whoever looks for the writer’s thinking in the words and thoughts of his characters is looking in the wrong direction…The thought of the writer is embedded everywhere in the course of the novel’s action…that is the architecture of the book: what Aristotle called simply ‘the arrangement of the parts,’” I now see that all that pushing and pulling the characters did to me happened because of the tide they were struggling against themselves. My tide. I put them in it to see what they’d do. When I felt as if they’d picked me up and taken me for a ride, it was because they couldn’t help it, not because I had somehow bestowed some magic in them. The ride was the plot I’d developed to carry the ‘moral focus’ of the novel. It came from those imagined circumstances, not the people who reacted to them. Oh what a surprise that was to me, but now only a few days later I can’t believe I ever thought otherwise. It’s so obvious.
Of course people who live their lives reacting only to events around them instead of making the circumstances themselves aren’t living fully, but let’s face it, the flawed and weak among us are not only recognizable but totally human. It’s those characters that elicit so much empathy and connectivity for a reader. In his book called ‘Your Life as Art’, Robert Fritz states that as people grow, they move “from reacting or responding to circumstances to being generative and independent of those circumstances.” Yes I believe it’s true, but much of our culture is oriented otherwise, and so the plots we devise in our novels provide the quicksand we need to catch our characters in their often tortuous and sometimes miserable lives.
Does all this preclude creating nuanced, strong, lifelike characters? Of course not. As long as we realize it’s the warp and weft of the woven plot from which those characters spring, and not from the writer’s head directly. Oh, what a tangled web it is that keeps our protagonists struggling against the twisted fates we create. Following the threads will tell us everything the writer wants to say long before the characters will solve the puzzle.