Chip's Writing Lesson #28
In this issue:
- Writers Speak: Elie Wiesel and John Prine
- Craft Lesson: Five ways to build memorable characters
- Interviews: Get it on the damn page! Four Questions with Paula Span
- Writing to Savor: David Remnick on life under quarantine
- Tip of the Week: Reading dialogue aloud
WRITERS SPEAK
"With novels, it's the first line that's important. If I have that the novel comes easily. The first line determines the form of the whole novel. The first line sets the tone, the melody. If I hear the tone, the melody, then I have the book."
Elie Weisel
“Sometimes, the best ones come together at the exact same time, and it takes about as long to write it as it does to sing it. They come along like a dream or something, and you just got to hurry up and respond to it, because if you mess around, the song is liable to pass you by.”
John Prine, R, I. P.
"Sam Stone"
CRAFT LESSON: Five ways to build memorable characters
What makes a character unforgettable? A classic novel provides a handful of critical answers:
A distant husband, father to two flighty children. A narcissistic businessman with dubious ethics. A Loyal friend. A man who longs for a life with greater meaning than an existence he finds increasingly empty.
He could be someone’s father, uncle, husband, brother, a memorably flawed human being.
But George F Babbitt is actually a fictional character, a figment of a writer’s imagination. His creator was Sinclair Lewis, who wrote a series of closely observed satirical novels that won him the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes.
I first read his 1922 eponymous novel “Babbitt” in high school and have returned to it many times since. It’s been literature as comfort food. "Babbit" is almost a century old and admittedly outdated in many, ways, but it remains a classic of literary realism that never ceases to enrich me as a reader and writer.
Although he wrote fiction, Lewis brought to his novels a journalist’s attention to detail while researching his books.
Most of all, "Babbit" teaches valuable lessons on how to create a believable character. They are so vivid that I can tell you, even though I haven't cracked its pages in several years, what happens to him over the course of several months that constitute the novel’s trajectory. How he:
embraces a boosterish, patriotic and xenophobic middle-class business community;
gleefully rips off clients and his employees;
Ignores and cheats on his long-suffering wife;
comes to doubt his beliefs and existence;
engages in a misguided and humiliating affair and then, chastened by ostracism, renews his tragic allegiance to his culture and community.
How did Lewis create a narcissistic character that lingers so deeply in the mind? And what can writers of fiction and narrative nonfiction learn from his methods that they can bring to their own stories?
Strong characters are a mosaic of many features. Here are five principal ways, with examples from my Kindle edition of “Babbitt,” that Lewis relies on to create a believable figure. You can read the entire novel for free courtesy of Project Gutenberg.
Physical description
Action
Status details
Dialogue
Primary goal
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
What a character looks like creates a mental picture in the reader’s eye. Otherwise, he is a cipher. Lewis introduces Babbit in the opening pages as he sleeps:
He was forty-six years old now, in April 1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay. His large head was pink, his brown hair thin and dry. His face was babyish in slumber, despite his wrinkles and the red spectacle-dents on the slopes of his nose. He was not fat but he was exceedingly well fed; his cheeks were pads, and the unroughened hand which lay helpless upon the khaki-colored blanket was slightly puffy. He seemed prosperous, extremely married and unromantic;
What does my character look like, sound like, smell like? Will readers be able to visualize him or her?
ACTION
"Babbit" is a series of set pieces, built on scenes that show the protagonist in action. A boisterous lunch at his club. A boozy convention with a disastrous visit to a brothel. A fishing trip in the Canadian woods with his best friend, the reticent and artistic Paul Riesling. A bitter labor dispute in which he inadvisedly takes the side of the workers. His dealings with real estate clients. His brief love affair with a widow and his involvement with her alcohol-sodden friends. They show Babbit’s likes and dislikes, his interactions with other characters and his goals in life.
How do my characters behave? How do their actions drive the plot and reflect the theme?
STATUS DETAILS
Status details are realistic and revelatory items that bring characters to life in fiction and creative nonfiction. In The New Journalism, Tom Wolfe defines them as:
“the recording of everyday gestures, habits, manners, customs, styles of furniture, clothing, decoration, styles of traveling, eating, keeping house, modes of behavior toward children, servants, superiors, inferiors, peers, plus the various looks, glances, poses, styles of walking and other symbolic details that might exist within a scene. Symbolic of what? Symbolic, generally, of people’s status life, using that term in the broad sense of the entire pattern and behavior and possessions through which people express their position in the world or what they think it is or what they hope it to be. The recording of such details is not mere embroidery in prose. It lies as close to the center of the power of realism as any other device in literature.”
For Babbit, these are the contents of his pockets, totems of his career and station in life.
He was earnest about these objects. They were of eternal importance, like baseball or the Republican Party. They included a fountain pen and a silver pencil (always lacking a supply of new leads) which belonged in the righthand upper vest pocket. Without them he would have felt naked. On his watch-chain were a gold penknife, silver cigar-cutter, seven keys (the use of two of which he had forgotten), and incidentally a good watch. Depending from the chain was a large, yellowish elk’s-tooth-proclamation of his membership in the Brotherly and Protective Order of Elks. Most significant of all was his loose-leaf pocket note-book, that modern and efficient note-book which contained the addresses of people whom he had forgotten, prudent memoranda of postal money-orders which had reached their destinations months ago, stamps which had lost their mucilage, clippings of verses by T. Cholmondeley Frink and of the newspaper editorials from which Babbitt got his opinions and his polysyllables, notes to be sure and do things which he did not intend to do,
...But he had no cigarette-case. No one had ever happened to give him one, so he hadn’t the habit, and people who carried cigarette-cases he regarded as effeminate.
What status details are evident in my character’s life; from the car she drives to the contents of his wallet? What do they reveal?
Cover of French edition
DIALOGUE
How people speak to others and past them and to themselves within scenes reveals their character. In this exchange with his wife, we hear the kind of blustery monologue that characterizes Babbitt's solipsistic personality and witness a man child on full display.
“I feel kind of punk this morning,” he said. “I think I had too much dinner last evening. You oughtn’t to serve those heavy banana fritters.”
“But you asked me to have some.”
“I know, but—I tell you, when a fellow gets past forty he has to look after his digestion. There’s a lot of fellows that don’t take proper care of themselves. I tell you at forty a man’s a fool or his doctor—I mean, his own doctor. Folks don’t give enough attention to this matter of dieting. Now I think—Course a man ought to have a good meal after the day’s work, but it would be a good thing for both of us if we took lighter lunches.”
“But Georgie, here at home I always do have a light lunch.”
“Mean to imply I make a hog of myself, eating downtown? Yes, sure! You’d have a swell time if you had to eat the truck that new steward hands out to us at the Athletic Club! But I certainly do feel out of sorts, this morning. Funny, got a pain down here on the left side—but no, that wouldn’t be appendicitis, would it? Last night, when I was driving over to Verg Gunch’s, I felt a pain in my stomach, too. Right here it was—kind of a sharp shooting pain. Why don’t you serve more prunes at breakfast? Of course I eat an apple every evening—an apple a day keeps the doctor away—but still, you ought to have more prunes, and not all these fancy doodads.”
“The last time I had prunes you didn’t eat them.”
“Well, I didn’t feel like eating ’em, I suppose. Matter of fact, I think I did eat some of ’em. Anyway—I tell you it’s mighty important to—I was saying to Verg Gunch, just last evening, most people don’t take sufficient care of their diges—”
His bloviating speech also reveals his cultural and social influences in the manly but cartoonish banter with his friends over lunch at the Zenith Athletic Club.
“Oh, boy! Some head! That was a regular party you threw, Verg! Hope you haven’t forgotten I took that last cute little jack-pot!” Babbitt bellowed. (He was three feet from Gunch.)
It unveils his needs and desires in his pathetic attempts to seduce a young manicurist while his wife is away visiting relatives and to woo a neighbor at a dinner party.
“Anybody ever tell you your hands are awful pretty?”
What does my character talk like? What does the way he talks to others reveal about him or her?
PRIMARY GOAL
More than anything, Babbit wants to belong, to be part of a community that embraces and admires him even as he desires another life that enables him to be free of his family, his companions and his work. But even when he rebels, his actions and those of others thwart those desires. He cheats on his wife only to feel as trapped by that illicit relationship as he is in his sexless marriage. He befriends a Socialist in a labor dispute, betraying his class in a final act of rebellion which causes his friends and fellow Boosters to reject him. It is only after his wife falls seriously ill that his friends rally round him. Defeated, he rejoins their company, rejecting his dream life. The tragedy is complete.
What does my character want more than anything in life? Wealth? Respect? Victory? Love?
That goal will play into everything we learn about the character.
Since writers read twice—once to enjoy, the other to learn—dissecting one of your favorite books or stories as I did can be a valuable exercise. If you want to create a memorable character, study how one is made.
Pick something memorable you've seen or read and study how the writer built their characters. You will learn more about what it means to write well and, best of all, be inspired to do the same.
INTERVIEW: Get it on the damn page! Four Questions with Paula Span
Paula Span is an alumna of the alternative press and The Washington Post and has freelanced for a raft of newspapers and magazines. The author of “When the Time Comes,” a book on eldercare, she now writes the "New Old Age" and the "Generation Grandparent" columns for The New York Times. She has taught at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism since 1999.
What's the most important lesson you've learned as a writer?
Just get it on the damn page. Once you spit some stuff out, you can mess around with it and improve it. An editor can advise you (sometimes a mixed blessing, I admit). Other folks can read it and help make the work better. If it’s all in your head, where of course it’s perfect, and you therefore delete every sentence you write because it’s imperfect, then you can’t make it better and nobody else can help you. It’s a recipe for paralysis. Start writing.
What's been the biggest surprise of your writing life?
That I still take pleasure in it. It has been, no lie, 50 years that I’ve been a reporter and writer. I can’t claim to have loved every story or every minute, but I still take satisfaction in producing a decent sentence, a well-wrought column or an essay that says what I want it to say. Maybe I’ll get tired of this work when I’m 80, but maybe not.
What's the best piece of writing advice anyone ever gave you?
Let me turn this around (since one consequence of being at this for 50 years is, who remembers what someone told me back when?) and share a bit of what I advise my journalism students: a) Strong, active verbs. (It’s not incorrect to say, “He was a cab driver.” It’s just better to say, “He drove a cab.”) b) No sludge. (Sludge: using more words than necessary to convey your meaning. You don’t have to point out, “She held a microphone in her hand." How else would she hold it? If she were gripping it with her toes, you would have said so.) c) Avoid groaners like “journey” (unless describing treks across the tundra), “dream” (unless referring to visions during sleep) and “passion” (reserve for actual sex).
If you had to use a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer, what would it be?
Oh god, I don’t know. Maybe a mule. Not glam, not fast, kind of inflexible but gets there eventually.
Alex Kim/Unsplash
WRITING TO SAVOR
"And so you stick your head out the window of an apartment that you haven’t left in days and look down and around. You wait awhile before you see a single scurrying soul, her arms full of groceries. She’s wearing a mask and walking with the urgency of a thief. She crosses Broadway, past blooming magnolias on the traffic divider. She quickens her step and heads toward Amsterdam Avenue. Like all of us, she is trying to outrun the thing she cannot see. You close the window and wash your hands for the fourteenth time that day. “Happy birthday to you . . .” Twenty seconds of it. Never less."
"New York City in the Coronavirus Pandemic"
David Remnick, The New Yorker
My favorite bits:
"a single scurrying soul"
"the urgency of a thief"
"Like all of us she is trying to outrun the thing she cannot see."
"You wash your hands for the fourteenth time that day."
"Happy Birthday to you..." Twenty seconds at a time. Never less."
Nine sentences, 107 words, that capture the rhythms of a captive city.
TIP OF THE WEEK
Always read your dialogue in your novel or script aloud. If you stumble over it, so will a reader or a performer. Does it sound like a real person?
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Stay safe. Keep your distance. Wash your hands. Wear a mask.
May the writing go well and may you be well.
Nulla dies sine linea
Never a day without a line.