THE RIGHT START
The need for particularity is equally true in storytelling. The great writers start out by giving the reader, immediately, the ontology of the protagonist; or, to put it in the form of a literary rule, a writer should immediately tell the reader four things:
1. Who the story is about.
2. What he is doing.
3. Where he is doing it.
4. When he is doing it.
The reader must be placed in action, space, and time. In a good story we find out very quickly about the hero the things we want to know about ourselves.
INSPIRATION COMES AS WE WRITE
When I talk about my books knowing more than I do, I am not referring to something magic. Nor is it an easy way out which eliminates the hard work of putting together a story. Writing a book is work; it involves discipline, and writing when I don’t feel like writing. Robert Louis Stevenson said that writing is ten percent inspiration, and ninety percent perspiration…; it’s usually the other way around. Inspiration comes during work, not before it. The hardest part of the morning is the first half hour or so when I will put off for as long as possible the actual work on whatever book I’m currently writing…put off the moment of plunging in. But after I’ve dipped my toes in the cold water for long enough, I hold my breath and jump in. And once I’m in, if it is a day of grace (and it often isn’t), then something will happen, and just what that something is remains, for me, a mystery.
PLOTS CHANGE
You have to know a lot of the details when you begin a book, but very often those details change. Joshua in The Arm of the Starfish is a very good example. It takes place in Portugal, largely in Lisbon. The young hero gets involved in international intrigue. I had the book pretty intricately plotted. This is essential, because if you do not have a plot there is nothing to change.
So, as I had planned the story, Adam Eddington, the protagonist, has gone three nights without sleep, and he finally is allowed to go to sleep in the Ritz Hotel in Lisbon. In the morning when he wakes up after having slept probably fifteen hours, there sitting and looking at him was a young man called Joshua. Now Adam was surprised to see Joshua. I was surprised to see Joshua. There had been no Joshua in my plot.
As a writer I had a choice. I could say, “Out, Joshua. I will not have you. You’re going to make me rewrite 150 pages. I don’t want to do that. I’m lazy like everybody else.” Or I could say, “Okay. I’ll rewrite 150 pages,” which I did. I cannot imagine the book without Joshua. But where did he come from? And why did he come named Joshua? When he arrived and so named, I had a strong suspicion that he would be dead before the end of the book. And, indeed, he was.
And that is how it goes. You must practice your techniques. You must have a strong plot, but then you must be willing to let it change, to let it alter itself.
RISKING FAILURE
Risk is essential. It’s scary. Every time I sit down and start the first page of a novel I am risking failure. We are encouraged in this world not to fail. College students are often encouraged to take the courses they are going to get A’s in so that they can get that nice grant to graduate school. And they are discouraged from taking the courses that they may not get a good grade in but which fascinate them nevertheless. I think that is a bad thing that the world has done to us.
We are encouraged only to do that which we can be successful in. But things are accomplished only by our risk of failure. Writers will never do anything beyond the first thing unless they risk growing. I took a great risk when I wrote A Wrinkle in Time—and it almost didn’t work.
DON’T WASTE PAPER
When I’m writing first drafts, I buy photo-copy paper because it’s the cheapest, and your first drafts don’t have to be on good paper. Photocopy paper makes very good typewriter paper for your first drafts. And then for the final draft I buy a good bond paper because you owe your editors that, and you owe yourself to do your final typescripts on good bond paper. But that’s not until you’ve been through, for a book of about 350 pages, two or three reams of photocopy paper.
Because my office (as it were) is the library at the cathedral, I write on obsolete letterheads. All of the letterheads that get obsolete come to me, and I write on the back of them. My editors are beginning to like my obsolete letterheads to see what I’m writing on this time.
Paper, by the way, is valuable. It comes from trees. Don’t waste it. When I’m in a shop and I don’t need the brown paper bag, I don’t take the brown paper bag. Save a tree. I write on the backs of things. I write letters on discarded manuscript because it is important to treat paper lovingly and to treat paper as being something special and honorable, which it really is.
BOOK RESEARCH
When I was working on A Ring of Endless Light, I knew that I could not describe how a dolphin feels if I hadn’t felt a dolphin. And I really didn’t know what to do because I knew I couldn’t write this until I had felt a dolphin. Well, as so often happens when I’m working on a book, what I need gets handed to me just at the moment that I need it. Just as I had come to the point where Vicky had to swim out and meet Basil, Adam’s dolphin, I was flying to San Diego to teach at a writers’ conference. And there was Sea World. And I mentioned to the conference leaders that I needed to get in with dolphins.
So they called Sea World and I got to touch dolphins. And they do feel exactly the way I describe them. But I couldn’t have written that whole scene if I hadn’t been able to stroke a dolphin.
FINDING SATISFACTION
We are never satisfied with what we have done. We know that our best is never adequate. If I had to be satisfied with what I have written I’d still be on my first novel. But I wrote what was for me the best book I could write at that moment in time.
Section VIII
A LIFE OF THEIR OWN
Creating Characters
And I learned…that it was not I who created character; it was character who created me.
RESPONSIBILITY FOR CHARACTERS
An author is responsible for his characters in much the same way that a parent is for his children, or a teacher for his students. Sometimes this manifold responsibility weighs heavily on me; I want to retreat entirely, lest I do damage. But we have to accept the stark fact that we not only can but inevitably will do damage.
WE ALL NEED HEROES
Children don’t like anti-heroes. Neither do I. I don’t think many people do, despite the proliferation of novels in the past few decades with anti-heroes for protagonists. I think we all want to be able to identify with the major character in a book—to live, suffer, dream, and grow through vicarious experience. I need to be able to admire the protagonist despite his faults and so be given a glimpse of my own potential. There have been a few young adult novels written recently with anti-heroes; from all reports they are not the books which are read and reread. We don’t want to feel less when we have finished a book; we want to feel that new possibilities of being have been opened to us. We don’t want to close a book with a sense that life is totally unfair and that there is no light in the darkness; we want to feel that we have been given illumination.
THE WILLFUL CHARACTER
To write a book, to write a story, you have to have characters. You have to have people. And the creation of character is one of the most mysterious aspects of a novelist’s craft.
Where do the imaginary people who live, who love, who die, come from? Are they, in fact, imaginary? Well, the answer is paradoxical. No, they’re not imaginary. They’re real. They have lives of their own. Most novelists will agree that their characters are stubborn and willful. They do things which the writer never anticipated. And when a writer and a character have a clash of will, the writer would do well to listen to the character.
GETTING ATTACHED
The characters writers create become very real for them. You will often think of a character a long time before you begin to put that chara
cter into a book. One reason that I write about the same people so often is that I’m very involved with them and I want to know what happens to them.
INDEPENDENT CHARACTERS
When I start a book I know what I want to say, where I want to go, what my theme is. I think about my characters, what they are like, inside and out. But, as creator of the book, I give my characters free will. They surprise me by saying things I didn’t expect them to say, rather than what I had planned for them to say. They are frequently far better or far worse than I had thought they were going to be. Sometimes they make radical changes in the plot. But in the end the book is far more mine than if I had insisted on knowing everything ahead of time, keeping control of every little action.
MANIPULATING CHARACTERS
When you’re planning a book, you usually have your plot pretty well organized. Almost any writer of fiction who has spent a lifetime writing will tell you that your characters tend to do things you have not planned for them to do. Now you can insist that your characters do what you’ve planned for them to do. That is manipulating them. Or you can let your lovely plot go and listen to the characters and go where they want to go, which is usually wiser than where you wanted them to go. It’s usually more in key with their real character. It’s again what I’ve referred to as listening to your book.
I don’t know any writers who won’t say that their characters surprise them constantly, say things they didn’t expect them to say. But you are capable of manipulating your characters back into what you had planned. And any book you read that seems dead is usually where the writer has insisted on manipulating the characters and has refused to allow them to live their own lives.
PROTAGONISTS ARE CHOICE MAKERS
Choice is an essential ingredient of fiction and drama. A protagonist must not simply be acted upon, he must act, by making a choice, a decision to do this rather than that. A series of mistaken choices throughout the centuries has brought us to a restricted way of life in which we have less freedom than we are meant to have, and so we have a sense of powerlessness and frustration which comes from our inability to change the many terrible things happening on our planet.
All the Faust stories are studies in the results of choice. Dostoyevsky’s story of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov is one of the most brilliant pieces of Christian writing that I know, and one of the most frightening, because the Grand Inquisitor, like many dictators, is plausible; he wants people to be happy; he does not want them to suffer; the Church, because of the great love it has for humanity, has done its best to reverse all the damage caused by Jesus, with his terrible promise of the truth that will make us free. We do not want to be free, the Grand Inquisitor assures Jesus. We want these stones to be turned into bread.
PROTAGONISTS ARE ICONS
I’ve noticed in many of my favorite novels that the minor characters are more minutely described, much more physical detail is given about them, than about the hero. A protagonist should be an icon for the reader. A photograph can be a simile, an image; it can seldom be a metaphor, an icon. And though I love snapshots of family and friends, there are times when the camera’s reproduction pushes me further away rather than bringing me closer to the people I love most.
HUMAN COMPLEXITY
I guess I simply try to portray my adult characters as they are, and some of them are evil, and some of them are noble. They are a mishmash like the rest of us of good people and bad people, and most of us are neither all the way good nor all the way bad. It would be lots easier if we were. And that, of course, is part of fiction—to show the complexity of the human being.
We tend to want the people who are good to stand on pedestals and not to have clay feet, and we want the people who are bad to be wholly evil. And that is not the way the world works. We do dreadful things with the best will in the world trying to do good. Sometimes we blunder into doing good when we don’t even know what we’re doing.
DIS-COVERING CHARACTERS
Now is there any such thing as a completely imaginary character? I doubt it. A writer is a dis-coverer: He uncovers what is already there. Or he is an invent-or: He takes inventory of what is already there. He does not create ex-nihilo. He uses what has made itself known to him all his life, and he uses this material in the most concrete manner possible. For, as Henry James says, the job of the novelist is to render, not to report; to show, not to tell. And this rendering, this showing, depends on all the people the writer has ever known—family, friends, people met at airports, students met at Wheaton, people seen on buses, subways, in the street. They all leave their imprint on the creative subconscious mind of the writer.
A character in a story may well be an amalgam of many people, some well known to the writer, some simply observed. And the creative-below-the-surface mind will do the underwater work and send the character up to the surface when needed. It’s a mysterious act of collaboration between intellect and intuition.
CHARACTERS ARE BASED IN REALITY
I can only affirm that the people in my stories have as complete and free a life of their own as do my family and friends; to the extent that they become alive for the reader, the story has succeeded. For me, this says a lot about the nature of reality.
The only inadvertent exceptions I’ve made to my usual unknowing where or from whom my characters spring are Rob Austin, who simply is our youngest child, and there’s nothing I can do about it; and Canon Tallis, who walked, unexpected, into J.F.K. Airport when Adam Eddington was waiting to fly to Lisbon. If I tried consciously to write about an actual person, I would be limited by that person; the character could not do anything that the person, as far as I understand him, would not do. But an imaginary character is not limited; he does and says all kinds of things I don’t expect, and often don’t want. When a character wants to do one thing and I want him to do another, the character is usually right.
But I don’t suppose it’s possible for a writer to create a wholly imaginary character. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are drawing from every human being we have ever known, have passed casually in the street, sat next to on the subway, stood behind in the check-out line at the supermarket. Perhaps one might say that we draw constantly from our subconscious minds, and undoubtedly this is true, but most important than that is the super-conscious level which comes to our aid in writing—or painting or composing—or teaching, or listening to a friend.
OUR CHARACTERS ARE WOVEN FROM OURSELVES
Of course I’m Meg—nearsighted. I’ve got on contact lenses (which I have to wear, by the way. It’s not vanity. I had eye surgery). I’m stubborn and didn’t get along well at school. I made Meg good at math and bad at English. I was good in English and bad at math. I was an only child, and I gave her three brothers. I’m Vicky Austin, not Mrs. Austin, though the Austins live in our house and do many of the things that we do.
In The Other Side of the Sun, I’m Stella, the young English wife; but I am also, to my amazement, Aunt Olivia, who is in her eighties. And I had never before identified with somebody who was that much older than I am. In A Severed Wasp, I’m Katherine. I identified with Katherine, who is pushing eighty. I’ve discovered that chronology is sometimes irrelevant.
KEEPING TRACK OF CHARACTERS
Sometimes a character I thought of at first as being dark haired and short will reveal himself to be fair and tall. And if I pin him down on a file card, he isn’t free to change and let me know what he really looks like. Not that I don’t take notes on the people who come to me. I do. I think about them for months or years. I write about them on slips of paper which usually get lost. I describe them in my journals. They reveal themselves to me, show new facets.
And sometimes it’s a long time before a character will name himself for me. And until I know someone by name, I cannot write about him with authority. A Stella will respond to a crisis in a different way than an Emily. Matthew will not see things in the same way as Simon. Sometimes
I’ll refer to my notes during the first draft of a book, but more often simply the fact of having written them down is enough to have set them in my memory.
But where do these people come from in the first place? Does the writer ever know? Well, occasionally, not always.
MYSTERIOUS ORIGINS
If the character in fiction is real and not imaginary, that still doesn’t answer the question of where Alice or Hamlet or Ivan Karamazov comes from. To say that the characters in the story act and think for themselves, that they’re more alive than many of the people I meet each day, is true. But it’s not enough. They’re real for me in a deeper sense of reality than that of everyday relationships—even the dragons and the seraphim, even Progo the cherubim in the Queen of the Dolphin. But I don’t bump into them on the street as I do my friends.
So where do they come from? What is a writer’s part in the depiction of character? Antigone was not sent to Sophocles by a god in a machine. The depiction of character is not a magic act. How does the novelist exercise the craft?
Madeleine L'Engle Herself Page 12
