Dynamic Characters

by Nancy Kress

  So now your protagonist is thinking, and your readers are privy to at least some of his thoughts. That makes everything about him much sharper and clearer.

  Or does it?

  Only if readers can tell clearly which are the character's thoughts, and which the opinions of the author. How to present characters' thoughts without confusion, especially in a third-person story, is a perennial hot topic in writing classes. Should the diction match the character's dialogue or the writer's narrative style? Do you need ''he thought'' every time somebody thinks about something? How else will the reader know whether the sentence is in the character's mind or is the author's statement? Do you put thoughts in quotation marks? In italics? In their own paragraph? Do you switch to first person for intimate thoughts? What about dialect in the privacy of a character's head?

  It's enough to make a writer stick to first person forever. But you don't have to use first person in order to handle characters' thoughts smoothly. Certain techniques can help you get a grip on the more slippery third person. In fact, you can even strengthen characterization by paying attention to the mechanics, distance, diction and style of your characters' thoughts.

  Let's first dispose of the simplest concern: format.

  MECHANICS: I CAN COUNT ON YOU

  Here are five different ways to present the same character thought in a third-person story written in the past tense:

  John looked at the girl across the room. She's beautiful, he thought. I want to meet her. [Thoughts in present tense, first person, italicized, tagged with ''he thought'']

  John looked at the girl across the room. She's beautiful. I want to meet her. [Thoughts in present tense, first person, italicized, untagged]

  John looked at the girl across the room. She's beautiful, he thought. I want to meet her. [Thoughts in present tense, first person, not italicized, tagged]

  John looked at the girl across the room. She was beautiful, he thought. He wanted to meet her. [Thoughts in past tense, third person, not italicized, tagged]

  John looked at the girl across the room. She was beautiful. He wanted to meet her. [Thoughts in past tense, third person, not italicized, untagged]

  Each of these is the choice of various writers. The only real rule is a reasonable consistency. Whatever presentation you choose for characters' thoughts, use it consistently so that your reader, once she's caught on, doesn't have to make mental adjustments for mechanics. That will only distract her from more important things.

  For the same reason, don't use quotation marks, single or double, around characters' thoughts. The reader will see the opening quotes and assume that what follows is dialogue. If she then finds a ''he thought'' tacked onto the end, she'll have to adjust her mental picture:

  This guy is not talking out loud after all. That's distracting. And the next time she encounters quotes, she won't know if the character is talking aloud or just ruminating.

  Once consistency is out of the way, do the five formats for presenting thoughts offer different advantages and disadvantages? Yes.

  Using italics (which are always indicated in manuscript by underlining—but you already knew that) means switching both tense (from past to present) and person (from third to first). Let's see this in a slightly longer passage:

  Carla looked into John's face, which was bleary from four whiskey-and-waters before lunch. His pupils were unfocused. His smile—that smile she had once loved—looked equally unfocused, the foolish beaming of a man to whom all events are benevolent because no event is seen clearly. Dried egg crusted his beard. I can't do this any more, she thought. It's impossible.

  This technique works for short thoughts. However, for anything longer than a sentence, or if used often during a story, it can seem intrusive. The reader may feel that the writer can't make up his mind whether he's writing in third person or first. In addition, because italics are also used for emphasis, instance after instance of italicized thoughts may feel like artificial inflation. Characters who think emphatically all the time are just as tiresome as people who shout all the time.

  A smoother way to combine first-person thoughts with third-person narrative is to drop the italics but keep the ''she thought'' and the present tense. Thus, the above passage becomes:

  Carla looked into John's face, which was bleary from four whiskey-and-waters before lunch. His pupils were unfocused. His smile—that smile she had once loved—looked equally unfocused, the foolish beaming of a man to whom all events are benevolent because no event is seen clearly. Dried egg crusted his beard. I can't do this anymore, she thought. It's impossible.

  If you're consistent about this, the reader will accept the sudden switch to first person—if the sections of first-person thought are fairly short.

  But what if your character thinks a lot, and you have longer sections of thought to pass on to the reader? One option is to switch the thoughts from first person and present tense to third person and past tense, to match the past-tense narrative. Then the passage becomes:

  Carla looked into John's face, which was bleary from four whiskey-and-waters before lunch. His pupils were unfocused. His smile—that smile she had once loved—looked equally unfocused, the foolish beaming of a man to whom all events are benevolent because no event is seen clearly. Dried egg crusted his beard. She couldn't do this anymore, she thought. It was impossible.

  This is a more seamless, less intrusive way to handle thoughts, because you switch neither person nor tense. It's true that the third-person thought will feel slightly less immediate—more reported to us than directly overheard by us—but the difference will be slight. And the gain in readability should offset that.

  Finally, you have one more option, which I think is the best because it's the most streamlined. Keep thoughts in third person and past tense but drop the ''she thought'' entirely, thus:

  Carla looked into John's face, which was bleary from four whiskey-and-waters before lunch. His pupils were unfocused. His smile—that smile she had once loved—looked equally unfocused, the foolish beaming of a man to whom all events are benevolent because no event is seen clearly. Dried egg crusted his beard. She couldn't do this anymore. It was impossible.

  But won't the reader wonder who thinks that Carla can't do this anymore: Carla herself, or the author? That depends on another important factor in handling thoughts: distance.

  DISTANCE: UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL—OR NOT

  The above technique will work when the third-person point of view (POV) is so close inside Carla's mind that the reader automatically assumes the last two sentences are Carla's thoughts. That happens when, throughout the whole story, everything we see and hear and experience has been through Carla's eyes, rather than reported to us from the outside by another pair of eyes (the author's). This is a crucial point, called distance.

  Distance is the measure of how far away you, the author, are standing from your character as you tell the story. Are you observing completely from the outside, as if you were a camera recording what your character does, and (like a news anchorman) occasionally commenting on it, as well? This is a far distance from the character. Are you standing right beside the character, so that you see (and tell us) the same things the character sees, with occasional forays into the inside of your character's head to give us his direct thoughts? This is a middle distance. Or do you spend the entire story standing inside your character's head, so that everything we see is filtered through your character's perceptions? This is close distance, often just as close as first person.

  Distance affects many things in fiction, among them the choice of format for characters' thoughts.

  When you the author spend most of your prose describing from the outside how a character is feeling, then the reader might very well experience some confusion over thoughts given without any ''she thought'' tag. Is this more description from the author, or is this the character's perceptions? Both a distant third-person POV and a close one can be effective, but which one you set up at the beginning of your story will
influence our reactions to untagged thoughts.

  This is easiest to see through example. Here are two subtly different versions of the same passage:

  Amy walked home as fast as she could, her fingers numb with cold. She allowed herself a moment of self-pity, her usual failing. Other kids' parents often drove them places, she thought. Carol's mom, for instance, drove Carol to soccer practice every day. She wished her mother was like that.

  Amy walked home as fast as she could, her fingers numb with cold. Other kids' parents drove them places. That stuck-up Carol, for instance—Carol's mom drove her to soccer practice every day. Why couldn't Amy have a mother like that? It wasn't fair.

  What's different here? In the first, more distant passage, we observe Amy from the outside. We are told that she feels self-pity; we are told that this is her usual failing (no teenager views herself dispassionately enough to make this judgment); we are told what Amy wishes. Given all this viewing from the outside, the ''she thought'' at the end of the third sentence is probably necessary to make sure that we understand we aren't also being told this information by the author, but that instead it represents Amy's actual thoughts.

  In the second example, we know from the second sentence onward that, instead of being told about Amy's state of mind, we're being shown her thoughts directly. This is made clear by the italicizing of other, reproducing the way teenage girls emphasize certain words; by the use of stuck-up; by the question Amy asks herself; and by the whining ''It wasn't fair.'' In this version, we don't need the label ''she thought'' because we're so close inside Amy's head that it's clear these are her thoughts, not the author's observations. And if you don't need the tag, drop it. It's just excess baggage.

  Often, of course, this is a judgment call. And nobody is going to reject your story if a few extra ''she thoughts'' creep into otherwise lean prose. Still, you can cut many tags once you become aware that they're unnecessary to a close third-person POV (although they may be necessary to a more distant one). The list includes, but is not limited to:

  • His thoughts drifted to . . .

  • He wondered .. .

  • He realized that. . .

  • He remembered the time when . . .

  • He contemplated the . . .

  • He mused . . .

  It's sharper and more economical to just let your character get on with the content of his thinking, wondering, realizing, remembering, contemplating or musing, rather than to announce that he's about to do these things. And, of course, I don't have to tell you not to write, ''He thought to himself.'' Except for telepaths, there is no other possibility.

  DICTION AND PERSONALITY: GETTING TO KNOW YOU

  As we discussed in the last chapter, the content of characters' thoughts is tremendously important. What your character thinks about helps to create his personality for the reader. So does how he thinks: in what words, with what sentence structure, with what level of grammatical correctness.

  Consider two characters, both in close third-person POV, both imagining themselves shooting a hated enemy:

  Guts. That's what he wanted to see. Grayson's guts, sprayed red and purple all over the wall. And Grayson writhing underneath. Still alive. A long time alive. Yeah.

  He would watch the entire brief performance, the one-act passion play, from over the barrel of the rifle. The gun would feel cool and smooth in his hands. He could feel it there now, could see the staging: the setup as Grayson turned toward him with a shocked face, the climax as the bullet slammed into Grayson's chest, the denouement as his old rival lay dying. Oh, yes, he would watch closely, and no other performance would ever have felt so rich, so nuanced, so completely satisfying.

  These are very different men. Their thoughts are equally violent, but the first character comes across as more visceral, more direct, less sophisticated. That's due to the Anglo-Saxon diction, the short and choppy sentences (only one is grammatically complete), and the lack of outside references. This guy thinks in concrete, brutal images. By extension, we see him as concrete and brutal.

  The second character's thoughts, in contrast, use more Latinate words, longer and grammatically complete sentences, and an entire metaphor lifted from theater. Both writers have adjusted their narrative style while in their characters' thoughts—and both have succeeded in strongly characterizing their fictional killers.

  The result of this matching of diction, sentence structure and level of sophistication to a character's personality is twofold. First, a given character's dialogue and thoughts will end up sounding consistent with each other. And why not? The same person is having thoughts inside his head and speaking thoughts out loud.

  Second, the closer the distance between author and character, the more alike thoughts and dialogue should sound. At the very closest third-person POV, the author's language disappears and the entire story is told in the character's language. Any distinction between the style of thoughts and the style of, say, description, disappears. In essence, the entire story is the character's thoughts (just as in first person), and the language subtly reflects that.

  Here, for example, is a passage from Mary McCarthy's The Group. The POV character is Libby MacAusland. And even though this brief passage is a description of Libby's boss, the content and language are Libby's own:

  She often found him reading a magazine: The New Masses, she noticed, or another called Anvil, or still another with the peculiar name of Partisan Review, which she had tried to read in the Washington Square Bookshop. That's what gave her the idea of slipping words like ''laborer'' into her conversation, to remind him that she too was one of the downtrodden. Rumor had it that there were quite a few pinks in the publishing biz.

  Who thinks that Partisan Review is a peculiar name? Not the author. Pinks, biz, Rumor had it—this is all Libby's language, a reflection of her desire to be hip and snappy without having a clue as to what her boss (or anyone else) is really all about. These words would not work in a more formal novel with a greater distance between author and characters: E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, for instance. McCarthy's language reflects and subtly reinforces the intimacy with which we've invaded Libby's mind.

  THINKIN' REAL SMOOTH AND EASY: DIALECT IN THOUGHTS

  You can even extend this technique to include reproducing regional or ethnic dialect in a character's thoughts, not just in her dialogue. This is from Susan Glaspell's story ''A Jury of Her Peers,'' which was made into the often-produced play Trifles:

  Harry was Mrs. Hale's oldest boy. He wasn't with them now, for the very good reason that those potatoes never got to town yesterday and he was taking them this morning, so he hadn't been home when the sheriff stopped to say he wanted Mr. Hale to come over to the Wright place and tell the county attorney his story there, where he could point it all out. With all Mrs. Hale's other emotions came the fear now that maybe Harry wasn't dressed warm enough—they hadn't any of them realized how that north wind did bite.

  In that last sentence you can hear the distinctive phrasing of the rural Midwest. But, as with spoken dialogue, a little dialect goes a long way. Author Glaspell has used a light hand with her regional phrases (''hadn't any of them realized how that north wind did bite''). To use dialect in thought without being hackneyed or distracting, follow the guidelines for dialect in dialogue (see chapter five).

  Your character thinks about certain things, in a certain way, because of who he is. Through thoughts whose diction and sentence structure reflect that identity, and through keeping the mechanics and POV distance consistent, you help us to understand this character's individual personality. How could we not? We're inside his head, where identity resides. He thinks, therefore he is . . . alive.

  SUMMARY: CLARITY IN CHARACTER THOUGHTS

  • Be consistent in whatever format you choose for presenting thoughts.

  • Make your choice partly on the basis of how much distance you're keeping between author and character.

  • Do write thoughts in the diction, sentence structure and leve
l of sophistication that match the character's personality (which means that dialogue and thoughts will sound similar). The closer the distance, the more alike thoughts and dialogue should sound.

  • Keep italicizing to a minimum, to avoid looking as if you think every character thought is worthy of great emphasis.

  • Keep ''he thought'' tags only when you need them to avoid confusion.

  • Use dialect with a light hand.

  Recently I saw a story from a young writing student. The story had three characters: a young man, his fairly young stepmother and his retired father. The first two characters were interesting and individual. The father, on whom the point of the story depended, did nothing but sit around and say little. We not only didn't see much of his externals (appearance, gestures, dialogue—all the good stuff we discussed in part one), we also didn't get much sense that anything was going on internally.

  ''The father isn't strong enough a character for his part in the story,'' I said. ''What's he really like as a person?''

  The student shrugged. ''Oh, you know—he's retired. Nothing to do all day. So naturally he's depressed and bored. I just assumed you'd get that.''

  Well, no, I didn't. My student was making an assumption about his

  character—that all retired men are depressed and bored—and then a further assumption that I would share the first assumption. I didn't share it. I know too many retired men who are not depressed and bored (including my own father). As a result, I came to the story with a different set of assumptions, and what was on the page didn't communicate.

  The young writer assumed way too much—about both his character and his reader.

  This is not as simple a subject as it might at first seem. Assume that we need every single detail explained, and you will show us so much detail that we become bored and impatient.

  Assume that we completely share your view of the character and you will leave out necessary details: the thoughts, gestures, attitudes that illuminate your character and bring him to life on the page.