TITLE
Now think about the title. Write it down. I bring it up now because I think it is so related to the character and the theme of the novel. What element of meaning does it reflect? Setting? Fate? Relationships? Events? A character’s name? A good title beckons the reader, of course, but to my mind it does far more—it establishes an expectation, however subliminally, that will be met by something that is unique about the story. Consider a few:
Madame Bovary. Now, you may say, that’s the name of the main character, so what? Ah, so true; but notice that it isn’t Emma Bovary. It is the woman trapped in her loveless marriage, the spiral of her bad choices, her suffocating life, her fate. Wife.
The Great Gatsby. Like so many good titles, this one is ironic. Gatsby had a lot going for him but he overreached. He was great at self-invention.
The Grapes of Wrath. The story goes that John Steinbeck’s wife came up with this title, which carries so much weight with its biblical reference (the Book of Revelation). Even more directly, it is pulled from the abolitionist anthem “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Steinbeck was writing his great story of the oppression of the poor by the selfish landowners and banks. His title is testimony of his commitment to justice, and his ire when the poor are trampled.
For Whom the Bell Tolls. Again, a reference (“it tolls for thee”) that strikes a chord. Again, Hemingway plowing the fields of war. This is a title of fate and vision, poetry and sorrow.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. This wonderful classic coming-of-age novel is all about place and time, and the title captures that, while also calling up the idea of a young person coming of age.
Waiting for the Barbarians. Again, a title of context, South Africa at its cruelest time. You have to know things aren’t going to work out well.
The Good Mother. Sad to say how ironic this. Sue Miller’s heroine is a mother who loves her child like breath itself, but she is punished for being a woman; the child is taken away from her.
Make a list of novels you admire and figure out how each title relates to the concepts you’ve been reading about. It’s never easy to come up with exactly the right phrase, but don’t give up too soon. You want your title to lure the reader and promise exactly what you deliver. Make a game of it—try to match a title to each of the categories I listed: vision, premise, world of the story, setting, context, character.
EXERCISES
List three novels you admire. Describe the protagonist’s fate in each one. Consider the emotional effect of a character’s fate on you, the reader.
Write a new last sentence for your novel that somehow represents a sense of the character’s fate. Try several.
Make a list of books you like. Describe what each title says about the book. Try to make up alternative titles.
10. Describe your other major characters.
In a first draft you may have characters who don’t really need to be there, or ones whose functions aren’t well developed. You may have characters who are in their own right interesting, but who don’t create push and pull with the protagonist. You know, of course, that the antagonist—the character most in conflict with the protagonist—will have to be strong enough to exacerbate the protagonist’s struggle. But every character has to relate to the protagonist in a way that matters. Lots of novels have minor characters whose function seems to be to make the story lively or shocking, but the need to decorate your story isn’t a reason to add a character. If you have someone in your story who could be taken out without upsetting the progress of events or the structure of the story, you have to question whether you need the character at all. (I’m not referring to the drive-by characters who function as part of a setting, such as clerks at stores, taxi drivers, musicians at a concert, etc.) There are of course stories that require numerous walk-on or recurring minor characters. Alan Furst’s spy novels set in Germany in the Second World War are remarkable for this very quality; everyone from waiters to military officers is distinct and colorful, adding both to the plot (what is coming) and the context (Nazi Germany).
Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine includes numerous minor characters who need to be there for the story to proceed, but whose function does not require elaboration. For example: a storekeeper; people on the train when the family is going to the camp; guards. But a minor character can be memorable, such as the man who is shot at the camp’s fence; he represents the terrible effect of deprivation and hopelessness on some prisoners. The novel is interesting in that there are no major antagonists. The family is in conflict with a system created by the government out of suspicion and fear.
Here is a brief example, from Walking Dunes, of a minor character who doesn’t take up a lot of page space but is important to the story. Sissy is a girl who lives off the same alley as David, and basically, that’s their relationship. But she looks up to him and catches him to talk now and then. She is a troubled girl whose efforts to hook up with a popular boy are undermining her fragile mental health. She keeps a notebook, and she gives it to David for safekeeping. (She doesn’t want her parents to see it.) Later, when she is killed, the notebook is important because it shows her state of mind and it backs up the assertions of the boy who shot her.
How does Sissy reflect on David’s character and create a problem for him?
Sissy is a lonely girl who wants someone to love her. She has been trying to win the affections of a popular boy. She sees David as a friend, even though she really has no reason to.
Sissy, like David, is a poor kid wanting something better, but she lacks his talent.
Sissy thinks of David as an ally, but to David she is just the neighbor girl.
Sissy is important because the aftermath of her death provides an ethical challenge to David, who has the girl’s notebook and knows that she asked David’s friend to help her die. (The boy shot her with her father’s rifle.)
Where David is ambitious and in some ways ruthless, wanting desperately to climb out of his poverty, Sissy is trapped in her belief that life has nothing to give her.
David knows that Sissy has been raped. He has ignored the fact, and her. David doesn’t give Sissy’s notebook to the attorney who should have it because he doesn’t want to be in any way attached to her; she is pitiful and he is afraid he’ll be drawn into a scandal. So Sissy is a foil that shows David’s moral weakness (even though it turns out the notebook would never have been used).
The girls in the novel project different aspects of David’s character. Sissy is minor except that her need exposes his shallowness and cowardice, most important, to himself. Glee is a cheerleader, a pretty girl who is crazy about him, and he never really sees her as a person with her own desires—other than for him. Patsy is the morally strongest character in the book, another girl in David’s neighborhood and class. She wants to be an artist of some kind, perhaps an actress; she wants to have a vibrant, fulfilling life, and she intends to leave Basin, Texas, to pursue it, however hard she has to strive. David loves talking to her and being drawn into her dreams and her sensibility, but she contrasts with him in the kind of agency she is creating for herself. Although he is attracted to Patsy, he has attached himself to the beautiful daughter of a wealthy family, seeing her as his way out of Basin, even though deep down he thinks the girl is vapid.
When you look at your lists of characters, take the time to pair each with the protagonist and consider the function of the character—what she or he does to move the story along—and how the character provokes or reveals something about your protagonist. Think about how each character also has his own story problem. Does that problem intersect or parallel the protagonist’s story problem? This is a subplot.
All major characters have to have a reason to be in the protagonist’s story; at the same time, they have to have stories of their own. Finding intersections is how you build conflict or alliance.
How large is the cast of your story? Are there charact
ers who duplicate one another’s functions? Would an additional minor character add color and perhaps a thread to the plot? Is everybody the same age for a reason? On a large piece of paper, draw stick figures or circles and label your main characters. Draw lines of connection, arrows of conflict, arcs of love. Look for ways to tighten and heighten relationships. See if one character could “do the work” of two. Look for characters who are too much alike.
EXERCISES
These exercises are challenging. Don’t rush them.
In a novel of your choice, list the major characters. For each one other than the protagonist, state why that character is important to the story. For each character, consider what story he or she has, and how it intersects the protagonist’s story. Describe two or three events connected to the character; are they independent of the protagonist, or do they intersect the main plotline?
Choose a character other than your protagonist and answer these questions:
What situation is the character in at the beginning of the story?
How does the situation create a problem (and a question) for the character?
How does the character’s situation and/or problem intersect with one of the protagonist’s?
Is the character an antagonist or an ally?
Is the character fundamental to the plot? (Could another character assume the particular actions of this one?)
How does the nature and behavior of this character contrast with the protagonist’s?
Go through your chapters, listing every character. This is a good activity to do on a large sheet of paper so that you can see everything at once. Make three or four columns for your list. You want to be able to look across the lists to see names recurring. If the task seems too formidable, do it first with a single chapter. Then do it with a section of the book that has an arc—the beginning that sets everything up and starts the conflict, perhaps. If it still feels difficult, do the exercise first with a short published novel that you know and like. Then go back to your manuscript.
List your major characters in caps. (The story has to have the character for events to occur; the character is part of the obligatory story. This list will include the characters who are important in subplots.)
Now list minor ones in small letters. (The character serves a need in a scene but appears briefly, or in a way that moves the action in a small way.) Don’t include people like doormen, taxi drivers, store clerks, etc., who are more part of the setting than characters. If they don’t affect the plot, they don’t go on your list. But minor characters can be important ones. For example, in The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, there is a private detective who makes an important discovery, but he appears only once, albeit for a lengthy scene. There is a conservation scientist (a person who tests for the authenticity of a painting) who appears twice briefly, but is important because what she learns provides a twist in the plot. On the other hand, there are a couple of characters in the first scene who never appear again; I wouldn’t put them on my list.
Annotate each character’s name with a phrase or label. If it is clear to you that a character is part of a subplot—a separate (intersecting or parallel) story line—note that. You will come back to him when you work with “threads” later on.
And remember that characters are not only themselves; they are also projections and antagonists of the main character. Foils. Modifiers. Mirrors. They represent currents of subtext, setting up triangle love patterns, struggles for money and authority, the weight of the past, etc. A subplot is both a who and a what. Save the list; you will need it later.
Look over your list:
Who acts to undermine the protagonist’s goal?
Who acts to support the protagonist?
Are there any triangles? (Two people opposing the third?)
Which characters are most present (appear in the most chapters)? Are they interesting? (Memorable?)
What secrets are in the subplots? What happens when they are revealed?
Are there characters that really, truly don’t need to be there? Don’t choke your plot with extraneous story lines.
Find a scene that you think is one of the most dramatic events in the novel. Who (other than your protagonist) is important in the scene? Does this character appear often in the novel? If this is a single appearance, is it an important one? Could the function be folded into another character? Repeat this exercise with other dramatic events.
What you are doing now is bringing all the actors on the stage so you have a picture of the whole cast in mind. Come back to it again. You have been looking at the connections between characters, and the ways that they bump against one another. Now think about each character as an interesting invention. Could any character be more colorful, scary, appealing, mysterious? Are any two characters too much alike in appearance or behavior? Conversely, is anyone “over the top,” too broadly drawn in comparison to other characters or to the tone of the novel?
Assessment
How have I told my story?
Describe your point of view and how it works.
Describe the structure of your novel.
Write a tagline for each chapter—the list is a summary of your story.
Evaluate your first chapter.
Choose six noncontiguous scenes and describe how they connect across the plot.
Mark the scenes to indicate backstory. Evaluate for relevance, economy, trigger, and transition.
Mark passages of summary and exposition, and evaluate.
Mark passages of interiority, and evaluate.
Choose two key scenes and evaluate them using a scene template.
As you begin to evaluate what you have written, keep good notes. If you have a bound copy, you can write on the blank pages when you are assessing particular scenes or chapters. Or start a separate notebook or log in which you record your observations and possible revision issues. You want to compile a picture of your draft that allows you to make decisions down the line about what needs to be done. It’s impossible to ski through a manuscript and keep everything in your head.
1. Describe your point of view and how it works.
When you started writing your novel, chances are you used a default point of view, by which I mean the sound of someone telling the story “came to you” as you began the work. It’s how you heard the story in your head. That’s fine, except that you want to consider if it is the most effective approach.
Some think of point of view in simple terms of person: first (“I” or even “we”), second (“you”), or third (“he” or “she”). You probably already sense that the decision about what POV to use is not that simple. There are considerations of distance, intimacy, voice, authority, and more. You can write a thesis on the subject, but ultimately the choice of POV is first intuitive, and then considered.
Here’s the simplest way to think of it: A narrator is telling a story. The story concerns events and the characters who are part of those events. A particular character or certain characters are most affected by the events and have the most participation in them, so we are especially interested in what they think and how they feel, though it can also be very effective to have an onlooker tell a story. You choose where to “stand” in relation to the story. Is the narrator an observer or someone in the thick of it?
I find it helpful to consider these elements of point of view:
Whose consciousness are we hearing?
How close are we to the story (in time, in intimacy)?
Is there commentary?
The first question could be answered most simply by naming the main character and using third person. This is the most common strategy and there is nothing wrong with it. But you have a world of choices. One of my students is writing a fascinating novel in which a house sometimes comments on its occupants. We had a novel lately with a dog’s perspective. In an omniscient (s
ee all, know all) POV, the consciousness is the narrator, a kind of overarching angel of the story. Flaubert uses this kind of voice in Madame Bovary, but he also shifts voice (the sound of the telling) to reveal what Emma Bovary is thinking, changing diction to reflect her perception and attitude. (This was an innovation; it’s hard to think there was a time when writers didn’t use “free indirect discourse.”)
The second question about distance has a whole lot to do with the voice. Is the narration looking back on something in the near past, or to the distant past? Is there an “occasion” for the telling, something that has called up memory? (A death? The reappearance of someone? The discovery of an artifact?) Is the story being discovered in the course of the narration, or revealed by someone who knows it? Nick Carraway is telling Gatsby’s story after it happened. He expresses his view of himself as the author—a person trying to find the meaning of what has happened. So he was close to the action (close enough to be an observer), but, in telling, he has stepped back and is reflecting.
Conversely, in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time the narrator is a boy who is charmingly direct in describing not only what he does as he goes about investigating a dog’s death, but also explaining to the reader why he does things his special way, without any conventional perspective—that is, distance—at all.
Most of my students have come to me using the close-third-person POV. This means “entering the head” of the character and experiencing everything as that character acts, sees, and feels. For many years it seemed to me most American short stories were written in this POV, and many novels, but I see more variety now. Writers from other cultures have never been locked into our ideas about point of view.
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