by Philip Meyer
1. Description. Vivid characters are often initially presented through economical use of selected details. Depiction of character through description need not be comprehensive in design. Indeed, just the opposite—an overload of psychological or physical description, employing the baggage of too many descriptive details, too many adjectives, and too much motivational backstory detracts from effective characterization, especially in plot-driven legal and popular stories. That is, the explanation of a character’s character is usually ineffective because this strategy slows the propulsion of the plot; and because it slows the plot, the story is made suspect and distrusted by the audience.
Nevertheless, effective characterization captures appropriate traits, often in arresting imagery or in vivid detail that calls forth character. Carefully selected details can imply, or even reveal, the character whole cloth. Often, the audience assembles for itself the accretion of pieces into the composition of the character’s character. What is left out of the composition is often as important as what is included. Characterization flows from the story itself, as if the narrative or argument compels the relevant details. Effective depiction of character through description is a composition of meticulous and intentional choices that compel the attention and interest of the audience and simultaneously, allow the audience to complete the composition.
2. Dialogue. The critic and essayist James Wood comments that “[w]e can tell a great deal from a character by how he talks and whom he talks to—how he bumps up against the world.”38 That is, we bump up against the world through our verbal communications and interactions with others, in dialogue. Likewise, we read an individual’s character into what that individual says and how he or she says it. As Anthony Amsterdam tells his students, especially when the students are young legal practitioners preparing appellate and postconviction briefs, dialogue is frequently the legal storyteller’s single most effective instrument for creating believable characters. Some students, especially in attempting to understand the art of brief writing and creative advocacy, respond that “you can’t submit a brief in written dialogue,” to which Amsterdam, in turn, replies, “Sure you can.”39 He follows up: “That is what quotation and paraphrase [which narratologists call ‘indirect discourse’40] are all about.”41 Further, records and transcripts are always chock full of “quotable testimony, colloquies, motions, and rulings” that, in Amsterdam’s words, “can be used to create a rogues’ gallery of characters damned near equal to Shakespeare’s.”42 I don’t know whether I’d go quite this far. Nevertheless, as we will see in Donovan’s closing argument on behalf of Louis Failla, dialogue is a powerful tool to convey character economically and compellingly, and there is often plenty of material available in virtually all forms of legal storytelling (from trial arguments to appellate briefs) to employ dialogue creatively and imaginatively in service of character.
3. Action. As previously observed, character is not fixed or static; characters change. Complex characters develop as a story progresses, with the characters’ motivations and actions driving the plot forward. Thus there is an interplay between character development and plot. The characters and the conflicts between various characters compel events, and the actions in the plot are, in turn, affected by the plot. Likewise, the fuller dimensions of character are revealed in response to, or in the aftermath of, the events of the story; these are what the novelist and short-story writer Katherine Anne Porter called the “reverberations” of the story,43 on both the audience and the various characters within it.
Character can and does imply conduct, such conduct not only attributing motivation and explanation for what has already happened in the story, but foreshadowing what will happen next. That is, the audience intuitively draws on notions of character and the character’s role within the story to look forward in anticipation of what will happen next, in addition to looking back into the past to fully understand what has happened so far. As Porter watches her characters heading toward their fates, she observes:
Every once in a while when I see a character of mine just going towards perdition, I think, “Stop, stop, you can always stop and choose, you know.” But no, being what he was, he already has chosen, and he can’t go back on it now. I suppose the first idea that man had was the idea of fate, of the servile will, of a deity who destroyed as he would, without regard for the creature. But I think the idea of free will was the second idea.44
It is only through the way a character acts that the audience can come to understand the underlying character traits that brought about those particular actions. This greater understanding of his character then informs how the audience expects him to act in the future.
A. Excerpts from This Boy’s Life
The use of the techniques of description, dialogue, and action to create, sustain, and develop vivid and compelling stories is apparent in literature, popular storytelling, and legal storytelling practice (including briefs, arguments, and, indeed, even judicial opinions). Several excerpts from Tobias Wolff’s masterful memoir This Boy’s Life illustrate this pattern. There are two characters in the following illustrative sequence of scenes. There is the complex protagonist-hero and narrator, Toby. And then there is the character of the vivid antagonist, Toby’s soon-to-be stepfather, Dwight. Unlike the villains in High Noon and Jaws, Dwight is not a flat or static character; he is a more complex “literary” character caught in an ever-deepening tangle of darkening motives, resentment, and rage. Likewise, Toby has an equally complex and changing character.
The sequence of scenes excerpted illustrate the use of: (1) description, (2) dialogue, and (3) action as tools or techniques of characterization, character development, and character change driving this well-paced and highly charged plot forward.
In the first sequence of scenes, the reader is introduced to the character “Dwight” as a minor and flat character. Dwight is vividly described; he is one of the many suitors of Toby’s beloved and vivacious mother, Marian. In the next sequences Dwight is further developed. Dwight evolves from a flat and minor character into a central figure in the story—Dwight, the distant suitor, will soon become Toby’s stepfather. Toby is being driven from his mother’s home in Seattle to his new home with Dwight and Marian in rural Washington. On the way, the dialogue reveals darker aspects of Dwight’s character: the physical details of the humorous, offhanded earlier depiction of Dwight open, like cracks or fissures, upon the darkness of his character. Finally, his antagonism to Toby translates into action and the confrontation between Dwight and Toby intensifies. This confrontation escalates through the remainder of the book as Toby attempts to escape the fate that awaits him with Dwight and to rescue Marian from her fate as well.
From an initial depiction (a physical description) of Dwight
Dwight was a short man with curly brown hair and sad, restless brown eyes. He smelled of gasoline. His legs were small for his thick-chested body, but what they lacked in length they made up for in spring; he had an abrupt, surprising way of springing to his feet. He dressed like no one I’d ever met before—two-tone shoes, hand-painted tie, monogrammed blazer with a monogrammed handkerchief in the breast pocket. Dwight kept coming back, which made him chief among the suitors. My mother said he was a good dancer—he could really make those shoes of his get up and go. Also, he was very nice, very considerate.
I didn’t worry about him. He was too short. He was a mechanic. His clothes were wrong. I didn’t know why they were wrong, but they were. We hadn’t come all the way out here to end up with him. He didn’t even live in Seattle; he lived in a place called Chinook, a tiny village three hours north of Seattle, up in the Cascade Mountains. Besides, he’d already been married. He had three kids of his own living with him, all teenagers. I knew my mother would never let herself get tangled up in a mess like that.45
Dwight drives Toby to his new home (action and some dialogue)
Dwight drove in a sullen reverie. When I spoke he answered curtly or not at all. Now and then his expression changed,
and he grunted as if to claim some point of argument. He kept a Camel burning on his lower lip. Just the other side of Concrete he pulled the car hard to the left and hit a beaver that was crossing the road. Dwight said he had swerved to miss the beaver, but that wasn’t true. He had gone out of his way to run over it. He stopped the car on the shoulder of the road and backed up to where the beaver lay.
We got out and looked at it. I saw no blood. The beaver was on its back with its eyes open and its curved yellow teeth bared. Dwight prodded it with his foot. “Dead,” he said.
It was dead all right.
“Pick it up,” Dwight told me. He opened the trunk of the car and said, “Pick it up. We’ll skin the sucker out when we get home.”
I wanted to do what Dwight expected me to do, but I couldn’t. I stood where I was and stared at the beaver.
Dwight came up beside me. “That pelt’s worth fifty dollars, bare minimum.” He added, “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of the damned thing.”
“No sir.”
“Then pick it up.” He watched me. “It’s dead, for Christ’s sake. It’s just meat. Are you afraid of hamburger? Look.” He bent down and gripped the tail in one hand and lifted the beaver off the ground. He tried to make this appear effortless but I could see he was surprised and strained by the beaver’s weight. A stream of blood ran out of its nose, then stopped. A few drops fell on Dwight’s shoes before he jerked the body away. Holding the beaver in front of him with both hands, Dwight carried it to the open trunk and let go. It landed hard. “There,” he said, and wiped his hands on his pant leg.
We drove farther into the mountains. It was late afternoon. Pale cold light. The river flashed green through the trees beside the road, then turned gray as pewter when the sun dropped. The mountains darkened. Night came on.46
Later in the journey (dialogue and some action)
I played the radio softly, thinking I’d use less power that way. Dwight came out of the tavern a long time after he went in, at least as long a time as we’d spent getting there from Seattle, and gunned the car out of the lot. He drove fast, but I didn’t worry until we hit a long series of curves and the car began to fishtail. This stretch of the road ran alongside a steep gorge; to our right the slope fell almost sheer to the river. Dwight sawed the wheel back and forth, seeming not to hear the scream of the tires. When I reached out for the dashboard he glanced at me and asked what I was afraid of now.
I said I was a little sick to my stomach.
“Sick to your stomach? A hotshot like you?”
The headlights slid off the road into the darkness, then back again. “I’m not a hotshot,” I said.
“That’s what I hear. I hear you’re a real hotshot. Come and go where you please, when you please. Isn’t that right?”
I shook my head.
“That’s what I hear,” he said, “Regular man about town. Performer, too. That right? You a performer?”
“No sir.”
“That’s a goddamned lie.” Dwight kept looking back and forth between me and the road.
“Dwight, please slow down,” I said.
“If there’s one thing I can’t stomach,” Dwight said, “it’s a liar.”
I pushed myself against the seat. “I’m not a liar.”
“Sure you are. You or Marian. Is Marian a liar?”
I didn’t answer.
“She says you’re quite the little performer. Is that a lie? You tell me that’s a lie and we’ll drive back to Seattle so you can call her a liar to her face. You want me to do that?”
I said no, I didn’t.
“Then you must be the one that’s the liar. Right?”
I nodded.
“Marian says you’re quite the little performer. Is that true?”
“I guess,” I said.
“You guess. You guess. Well, let’s see your act. Go on. Let’s see your act.” When I didn’t do anything, he said, “I’m waiting.”
“I can’t.”
“Sure you can.”
“No sir.”
“Sure you can. Do me. I hear you do me.”
I shook my head.
“Do me, I hear you’re good at doing me. Do me with the lighter. Here. Do me with the lighter.” He held out the Zippo in its velvet case. “Go on.”
I sat where I was, both hands on the dashboard. We were all over the road.
“Take it!”
I didn’t move.
He put the lighter back into his pocket. “Hotshot,” he said. “You pull that hotshot stuff around me and I’ll snatch you baldheaded, you understand?”
“Yes sir.”
“You’re in for a change, mister. You got that? You’re in for a whole nother ball game.”
I braced myself for the next curve.47
The three techniques of character construction and development are illustrated nicely in this sequence. Initially, there is a depiction based on the physical description of a flat yet vivid secondary character, Dwight, who is “cast” onto the stage briefly. Wolff observes Dwight’s physical traits: “A short man with curly brown hair and sad, restless brown eyes[,]” placed next to the short and seemingly incongruous sentence “He smelled of gasoline.” Dwight is a character captured in fragments and disjunctions, and the pieces of him don’t fit together: “His legs were small for his thick-chested body[.]” But “what they lacked in length they made up for in spring; he had an abrupt, surprising way of springing to his feet.” Toby then describes Dwight’s dress: “He dressed like no one I’d ever met before—two-tone shoes, hand-painted tie, monogrammed blazer with a monogrammed handkerchief in the breast pocket.”
At the end of this description is the brief intimation of why Toby initially discounts Dwight’s importance in the story and explains why he will never be a successful suitor for his mother: “I didn’t worry about him. He was too short. He was a mechanic. His clothes were wrong. I didn’t know why they were wrong, but they were. We hadn’t come all the way out here to end up with him.” And then there is the wonderful line, and Toby’s misguided observation: “I knew my mother would never let herself get tangled up in a mess like that.” The reader is left with a flat but vivid image of Dwight’s character based on Toby’s description of him.
Subsequently, this secondary and flat character assumes a more important role in the story. Dwight “bumps up against” the protagonist Toby; incident and action explore the increasing conflict that develops between the two competing characters. There are the actions that occur on the trip to Toby’s new home; Dwight intentionally runs over the beaver (a vivid secondary “flat” character in its own right), and then Dwight attempts to compel young Toby into helping out with the roadkill. “Pick it up. We’ll skin this sucker out when we get home.” This incident, and the subsequent events, reveal the cruelty in Dwight’s character as the conflict deepens between Toby and Dwight, captured in dialogue: “‘Don’t tell me you’re afraid of the damned thing.’ ‘No sir.’ ‘Then pick it up.’ He watched me. ‘It’s dead, for Christ’s sake. It’s just meat. Are you afraid of hamburger?’” It doesn’t take us long to understand that Toby is, in the terms borrowed from the Amsterdam-Bruner definition of the progressions of a plot, deep in the “trouble.”48 Action and dialogue are used to add depth to Dwight’s character and the reader begins to question the assumptions made about Dwight based on Toby’s initial description.
In the final excerpt from this sequence of scenes, Dwight makes a pit stop at a tavern at the “last settlement,”49 and the conflict progresses in the “reverberations” to the action, again captured primarily in dialogue. Dwight, in an action that complements and reemphasizes the dialogue, swerves side to side on a “stretch of the road [that] ran alongside a steep gorge; to our right the slope fell almost sheer to the river.” This is a description of physical setting that provides a literal edge to the dialogue. The dialogue here foreshadows Toby’s future under Dwight’s authority and the conflict unfolding between them. “You’re in for a change, mist
er. You got that? You’re in for a whole nother ball game[,]” Dwight says. To which Toby responds presciently (and metaphorically): “I braced myself for the next curve.” Dwight’s true character is revealed through further action and dialogue, and he has completed the shift from a flat secondary character to the story’s main antagonist.
5
Characters, Character Development, and Characterization in a Closing Argument to a Jury in a Complex Criminal Case
I. The “Backstory”
In 1991, Louis “Louie” Failla, a reputed Mafia soldier in the Connecticut faction of a New England crime family, was one of eight defendants charged with racketeering.1 The thirteen-count indictment included charges that Failla supervised and operated illegal gaming businesses and engaged in wire fraud in connection with schemes to defraud the customers of these gaming operations. The most serious alleged racketeering act, however, was that Failla conspired with two mob informers to murder Tito Morales, his grandson’s father. The prosecutor’s case was strong; in fact, the evidence seemed insurmountable. The two informants who testified against Failla had been granted immunity and had reasons for lying—to avoid prosecution for other charges and to receive lenient sentences. Failla’s words, however, had been captured on tape. Failla’s Cadillac had been bugged and his self-incriminating conversations recorded. These tapes and the transcriptions of what one reporter called “Failla’s greatest hits”2 formed the centerpiece of the government’s case against Failla and his codefendants. In these tapes, Failla implicated himself in the conspiracy to murder Morales and bragged about his multiple roles in the illegal business enterprises that were at the heart of other charges in the indictment against him.
