When you look at the progression of events on your timelines, you can see whether the past really does have the weight you thought it did, and if it does, you can make rigorous decisions about where—and why—you will tell the reader what happened. In your chain of events, do you see triggers (reminders of some kind) that bring up the past? Do you see situations where a character has reason and occasion for pondering old news? Are there lingering consequences? Has resentment or emotional fallout been simmering for decades, soon to explode? To me the classic example of Big Backstory is the horror and carnage in a family’s past (abuse, murder) that explains the brother’s and sister’s fraught lives in Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides. It’s a narrative strategy that easily skids into melodrama, but it worked for Conroy.
Once you sort out the backstory you do want to include, you can study the passages where you have mentioned it—or should—and you can control:
The trigger (what brings it up).
The duration of the memory (how much page space telling it takes).
The nature of the emotional response (what effect remembering it has on a character).
The nature of new action as a result of raising the past (how the memory pushes a character into a dramatic response).
You can decide whether to include the past as an act of the character’s memory (interiority) or to stop forward action to present backstory as discrete narrative. There may be several, even numerous, references to the past, whether in dialogue or in scraps of memory—ghosts of past scenes.
Don’t integrate the past without making sure of three things:
You need to tell it.
This is the right time to do so.
It has a consequence, emotional or physical, for the character.
Every time you present the past, consider these three issues. Again, I want to emphasize that you must choose whether to tell something from the past—backstory—as part of a present scene (relevant to present action, brought up between characters, or in a character’s interiority) or as a flashback—a scene or narrative summary of its own, separate from present action. There is a kind of novel that roams the past and the present like adjacent landscapes, but it takes skill to make the strategy work. Whatever you do, you don’t want the reader to get confused.
Getting control of flashbacks and memories is a big part of maturing as a fiction writer, and creating a timeline (a placeholder) is a good start. You might find you want to chop some of the past right off that summary line. You might combine events—a controversial technique for memoir writers but an effective, efficient one for fiction.
A novel that uses history as the “real story” and builds the present of the novel with precision and economy is The Piano Maker by Kurt Palka. There are three chronologies in the book: (a) “now,” when the protagonist, Helene, moves to a small village in Nova Scotia and begins working as the church pianist and choirmaster; (b) the far past, from her childhood and young adulthood in a family that made pianos through her marriage and the death of her husband in war; and (c) the near past, a horrific story of deprivation and terror in the Arctic North, which is sprung on the reader as a sudden revelation. We know Helene well—or at least see her and like her and know where she came from—before we are suddenly made aware that she did something that might be criminal. The way that Palka handles the pace of all this is worth studying. The language is measured but crisp, lyrical but subtle. Not all reviewers agreed with me, but I thought it was a brave and fascinating novel.
Decisions about what part of the story’s past belong in the novel will be affected by the analysis you do in every stage of your preparations to revise. Stay fluid and don’t worry. If you simply do a description of what you have in hand, that’s fine.
Remember—you’re writing everything down!
EXERCISES
In a novel of your choice, identify an aspect of the past that impinges on the “now” of the novel.
Is the past interesting, not a cliché?
Does it really matter? How so?
What effect does it have, and why now?
Choose a place in your own novel where the past appears, is remembered, or in some way is relevant in the text. Evaluate (a) how it is presented (how it interrupts the flow of action) and (b) what its effect is on the story.
If you have a fairly complete draft with a lot of backstory, now would be as good a time as any to do an inventory of it. Go chapter to chapter, noting where the backstory appears. Keep a list. Annotate each instance with a description of how the past is introduced and what the effect is on the present story. What you want to look for is a boring pattern or confusion or memories that don’t affect what is going on at the time they are introduced. Think:
economy
function
variety
effect
8. Describe your protagonist in terms of agency, struggle, and transformation.
Nobody needs to tell you that a novel is about character. Well, sure, there are novels that aren’t—the flat-out plot-flying genre and commercial books in which characters are moved along a stream of suspense and violence, driven by outside forces they have to understand and overcome (perfect examples: John Grisham’s The Firm, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code). But the books you remember, and I hope the ones you want to write, have compelling characters. Where they come from and how you develop them—that’s a subject for another book, though we certainly look at characters in your revision. You are attracted to something in a character that touches you, because character swells up out of desire and fear and need. And just as I talked about story having two forces, action and emotion, I think character has to be driven both by what is going on outside and what is roiling inside.
What I want to offer here is a scheme for talking about character development. As I’ve said before, many apprentice writers get trapped in stories with characters who are acted upon, the victims of events or other people who are stronger than they are. And of course we expect a character to be beset with challenges. The issue is whether the character has enough responsibility for his own fate that we empathize with his struggle; if he is defeated, we want to see that he did not go down passively; if he wins, we want him to have earned it. And if he brings about his own downfall, we appreciate reversals and consequences. Responsibility for one’s own fate is a big part of making a character memorable. We expect a complex character to make some wrong decisions and bear the consequences; we expect her to face difficult choices and challenges. What thrills us is watching the character try.
AGENCY
The question, then, is: Does your protagonist have agency? If your novel is plot driven—let’s say there are aliens invading St. Louis and your protagonist is the smartest engineer, pilot, or military mind in town—that agency will be all about responding to the threat: the hero battling outside forces. If your novel is character driven, however, it is as likely that the challenge to the protagonist will come from something she does or wants, as from something or someone outside her, and it will be something that has a cost. Agency is the word for the character’s central role in pushing the story forward. She chooses, and acts, and bears the consequences. Maybe she fails, but not for want of trying.
My first novel, Gringa, was about Abilene, a young woman in Mexico during the 1968 Olympics. I know now that I was way out on a far, far limb with her as my main character, because she is tossed around by men and luck and has no real power. What I did intuitively—and I can only say it helped, not that it turned her into a heroine—was to make her stubborn, in love with the exotic, and also a bit self-deceiving. She talks herself into accepting situations that aren’t good for her, but she thinks she wants them or will make the best of them; for a long time, she doesn’t see that she is victimized. In the end, she does choose what is best for herself. The book ends with Abilene taking the reins of her life. She doesn’
t “do something” to anyone; her movement into agency is her retreat from the context in which she was abused. Ultimately, I think the novel was as much about the setting as it was about Abilene. Place was a crucible for her growth, as the novel was for my own.
Agency doesn’t mean cops with guns, cowboys with horses, or biceps as big as thighs. It means a character who pushes himself. Of course a character can do the wrong thing. Emma Bovary displayed plenty of agency, but her rosary of bad choices led her to her deathbed. Sometimes what a character wants is wrong, but following the desire of that character mesmerizes the reader. Here, I am thinking of Anna Karenina. The reader knows Anna should turn away from Vronsky, but the pull of her desire is greater than good sense, and that is why her fate moves us so much.
Sometimes agency may not seem possible. In When the Emperor Was Divine, a Japanese American family is sent to a camp for the duration of the war. What kind of agency could they possibly have? They could do their best to take care of themselves, their health and family ties. They could maintain belief in their integrity and the future. They could survive to rebuild their lives.
Sometimes you will have characters who try to exercise agency and it is not possible for them to prevent their defeat. In those stories, the struggle is the story. (Think of The Old Man and the Sea or the protagonists of Jim Harrison’s novellas in Legends of the Fall.)
If you are writing about someone with little power, possibly someone who will fail to achieve what she wants, be sure you illustrate that agency is about a person’s drive to act. It is possible to lack power but at the same time to be fiercely active in a struggle to achieve it. The act of deliberate struggle (as opposed to flailing when attacked) is a sign of agency. In Dai Sijie’s charming novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, two boys are sent to the countryside for reeducation during China’s Cultural Revolution. The boys “win” because they come upon a cache of books and discover the power of stories. The struggle and the victory are inside their heads and hearts. They don’t fight Mao, but in a fabulist way, Mao loses.
In The Piano Maker, Helene has no real power, but she is a strong woman and morally capable of defending herself. One of the most interesting and effective things about the novel is that the author establishes Helene’s new life in the Nova Scotia village, building for her a community, before her peaceful life there is shattered. The goodwill that she has built up, simply by being her true self, contributes to her agency when her freedom is threatened. It’s a generous vision, that a good person is one who behaves as a good person, and knows she has done so; and that such a person should not be punished for the cruelties of fate.
Think of how your character’s choices move the story along. And, as you begin the process of revision, see if you can strengthen the character’s will, wit, and wisdom.
STRUGGLE AND TRANSFORMATION
Of course you aren’t going to write a novel about someone who gets what she wants at the beginning. There has to be a struggle that injures or denies the protagonist his desire, upsets the equilibrium of his situation, or puts people he loves at risk. There has to be a tug-of-war.
There should be two levels of struggle:
The need for something concrete that the protagonist is fighting to get (such as safe haven, a scholarship at ballet school, or the love of a partner).
The urgent desire to be better.
Just think of all the questions raised by those two desires! Is the thing the protagonist wants achievable? Would it be good for him? Does he truly understand what it would be? Who else wants it? How does the protagonist define “being good” and “doing good”? Is he realistic about the sacrifice something may demand? These are the kinds of questions that help you complicate plot. What if?
Always, I pose questions because in answering them you may find a new plot point, a new aspect of character, an idea for a detail that makes a scene work better.
I do like to think of a novel as the journey of a person trying to be a better person. If that sounds a bit pat, think of it this way: You get to define the journey and all the challenges along its way, and you get to define what “good” means, and how far from that state the character is at the beginning. One way or another, it has to be hard for the protagonist to get from beginning to end. And it has to be worth the struggle.
The quality of the protagonist’s goal, the tenor of the protagonist’s struggle to achieve it, and the satisfaction that comes with arrival all create transformation. A character can fail and still become a better person, just as a character can achieve or attain but discover he has lost himself.
One of the strongest—and most unlikely—heroes of a recent novel is Christopher John Francis Boone, a mildly autistic and mathematically gifted adolescent boy who sets out to solve a murder—of a neighbor’s dog—and learns that he is capable of far more than solving intricate puzzles. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time won millions of readers who followed Christopher’s clever investigation and his transformation into a more independent person. You could learn a lot about character development by walking through this plot, listing each challenge and his strategy for meeting it. Everything is about action, because the boy’s emotional state is static. (Or so we are told.) The way a dog’s death leads to a restructured family is a marvel of plotting. Yet the very nature of Christopher’s syndrome is that he doesn’t change and doesn’t want to. How, then, is he a protagonist? How does he work for something he wants? The clever conceit of the novel is that Christopher admires mystery stories, where questions are solved by finding and examining clues that solve the puzzle. He has clear goals.
Of course there are stories about characters who can’t or won’t change. Heathcliff’s malevolent passion never changes, and Cathy is never able to resist, but oh what a struggle! The strength of intransigence, wreaking havoc, is appealing if it is done with great dramatic power.
If you can describe your character in these terms—agency, struggle, and transformation—you can “test” your plot points against your definitions, and you can assess the depth of character development by how dramatic these elements are. Ultimately, you have to define agency for yourself and your characters, and from that perspective, construct the struggle that is the main thread of your story.
How much power does your protagonist have in the beginning? Does she lose or gain power in the story? When? How?
What does the character want? Why doesn’t she already have it? How hard is it to get it? Does someone else want it, too, providing competition, or is it that someone doesn’t think the character should have it?
And if the character does achieve her desire, or if she doesn’t—how does the struggle change her? How does it change her relationships?
Exercises
Find a place in the novel where your character acts with fierce intention.
Find a place where it seems impossible that she will solve a problem that threatens her happiness—or the happiness of someone she loves.
Find a place where she behaves in a way she wouldn’t have chosen to behave, or been able to, in the beginning (like Christopher, the teenager mentioned above, who sets out on a train ride to London, a miracle of independent endeavor).
If you don’t have such character turns in your novel yet, is it possible to create them?
9. Describe your protagonist’s fate and its relationship to your vision.
RESOLUTION
At this point, describe how your novel ends—how it leaves the protagonist. Was the struggle successful? Were important lessons learned? What was lost or won? Was there surprise and satisfaction in the story’s resolution? Think again about your statement of the story’s vision—how things work in the world of the novel, what is inevitable, who has power. Look back at the situation the character was in when the story problem was established. What situation is the character in at the end? How do you leave the reader? Keep in mind that the bes
t kind of ending for a novel is one that feels both inevitable and surprising. You want the reader to recognize that this is exactly how things had to be, but you don’t want the reader to think: Well, I knew that would happen. The tension should not be broken prematurely. Ending a story in a way that isn’t predictable is a big challenge, maybe one of the hardest in writing a novel. If you’ve had trouble finding that ending, keep thinking, What if? Finding a more satisfying ending may take you back into the meat of the story, but that’s revising!
Ask yourself: At the end of my novel, has the life of the protagonist been opened or closed? I’m not talking about life or death, I’m talking about the possibility for happiness. Was this where the protagonist was always headed? Was it because of a flaw or a strength of character? Or was it because the world of the story was so powerful an influence? The answer lies in the convergence of your vision of the world of the novel with your character’s agency. And keep in mind that when the reader leaves that last page, she is saying good-bye to someone she has been with for many hours. You want it to be hard to leave the character, because he means something to the reader now. And yet you want that sense of perfect closure.
Can you go back and identify points in the story where the choices your character made put him closer to this particular ending? And even if the reader then thinks, I knew this would happen, there has to have been the possibility that it would not. The best response isn’t: I knew that was coming. It is, rather: Of course! I should have seen that coming.
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