What is Character?

by Sidney S. Stark

‘She doesn’t have any character,’ ‘Lord, what a character!’ or ‘It was really out of character’, all describe different traits within the parameters of personality, temperament and moral fiber. So clearly character can mean many different things to different people in various settings. But what does it mean to an author of fiction? Is it the same to some degree as the meanings we assign to it in everyday life or is there more to it?

That was the topic discussed at a lecture at the New York Society Library recently. The dialogue was between two highly accomplished and much lauded authors with different ideas on the subject. Meg Wolitzer and Elizabeth Strout are known for writing pages of fiction inhabited by wonderfully engaging people. Elizabeth gave me permission to use that adverb by the way. She loves judiciously placed adverbs. And since the characters these two women create are full of the wonder of life and its mysteries, I feel I’ve chosen the adverb with prudence.

The blurb announcing this lecture as ‘A Conversation About Character and Contemporary Fiction’ included a phrase asking ‘Who Are These People, and Why Do We Care?  It might have added the query, ‘Or Do We In Fact Care At All?’ We don’t have to like them, but we have to care. Both authors seemed to be in agreement about a few key ingredients that must be part of the ‘primordial soup’, as Meg Wolitzer put it, in order for us to believe in the validity of fictional characters. But there were definitely nuances to their analysis that took them in different directions.

Both authors spoke about the role of the character to communicate truths about love and life. The emphasis was clearly on truth, just as it is in memoir I noted to myself with irony.  But Elizabeth Strout spoke of the necessity to go below the physical or personal traits; ‘Way down inside to what’s real, where it’s always mysterious’ she explained. Again I noted an unexpected similarity to writing memoir. If I had to pick out one word describing Ms. Strout’s approach to creating fictional character it would be ‘intuitive’. And that was in fact her word.

Meg Wolitzer, while certainly not disputing her colleague and friend’s depiction of the search for a character’s essence, leaned more toward the desire for closeness. She described a need for proximity to the essence and the fact that fiction concentrates everything so the reader can get near to that person. The word I’d most associate with Meg Wolitzer’s description was ‘close’ which to me made her approach more observational and outside the character. But in reviewing my notes after the lecture I see that Meg wanted more to observe her characters from an intimate range, while Elizabeth actually wanted to be that person regardless of age, gender or circumstance. She said she’d been frustrated all her life by the knowledge that she could never truly know what it is to be someone else, but she tries with all her creative energy to do it through her writing.

I was struck as she spoke of that yearning, by the fact that it’s so much the same for an actor. I also know how highly sensitive people, by their own admission, often intuit the feelings of another so strongly that they’re actually feeling what it’s like to be that person. So does that mean a highly sensitive author has an innate ability to create truthful fictional characters?

When the authors asked each other what came first when they began a novel, the answers were diametrically opposed. Meg Wolitzer said that she starts with an idea of a plot or story that even includes a vague ending. The characters grow out of that idea for her. Elizabeth Strout said she never has an idea. She said she always sees a scene with someone in it, and the book starts as she tries to understand who that person in the scene is. So her novels are character-driven entirely with no ending in sight, and Meg Wolitzer’s are idea-driven with her characters derived from the plot.

Was all that confusing to an aspiring novelist? Not at all. It was in fact reassuring, as it showed there are as many ways to create truthful characters in fiction as there are authors who do it. Though there was one ingredient that was inextricable to success, and that was truth. Elizabeth Strout left us with the suggestion that intuition is the best way to know when a character is real or false.

I’ve found I can rely on my intuition with much more confidence as I’ve gotten older, so perhaps that means I’ll be better equipped to create truthful fictional characters. It’s nice (and unusual) to think you could do something better as you get older! I left the lecture inspired with the thought that there’s hope for a whole universe of my characters to emerge from the literary primordial soup. I can’t wait to meet them!

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