Out of character

When I was recently asked to work with an author on her manuscript, the first thing I had her to do for me was provide a written portrait of every character in her tale, from protagonist to walk-on, in forty words or fewer.

I did this for two reasons. First, to give her the idea that every character in her tale needed to exist as a fully functioning person, and not just a device. Second, so I could see whether she understood the essence of each character. I chose forty words rather than fifty because fifty is comfortable. Forty is pared down and creates panic. No room for meandering fat, there. It's all got to be lean meat.

This is a different approach than others might suggest. There's a place for the detailed sort of characterization that you create with a worksheet-style exercise. However, if you've created a squat, heavily-muscled lapsed Catholic former amateur middleweight boxer who was sexually abused by his parish priest when he was nine, works on Wall Street by day, moonlights as an enforcer for the Russian mafia by night, favors Tom Ford suits, continually tries and fails to perfect a chocolate soufflé, and you can't distill him into forty words for me, then you've got a problem.

But my characters are complex! I hear the protests already. Of course they are. Blah blah.

Our aforementioned stock-trading thug? Try this:

Tracey Caravaggio is sensitive, creative, forty-two years old, and bound with the shackles of violence as a result of childhood abuse. The suppressed demons of his past fuel his sociopathic lifestyle, while his essential nature struggles to break free.

Forty words--thirty-nine if you take the hyphenation into account--and I even got his name in there. That's because I rock the fucking house. Which I built. And defined the nature of "rocking" within. Moving on.

All of the window-dressing I described earlier is just that: frills and details. The essential nature of Tracey is defined in forty words. Implicit within them is the conflict of nature versus nurture, the question of whether a man is born or made. Each subsequent detail is an expression of the core facts of his life. Tracey appreciates the finer things in life, and works at a legitimate job which will provide him with an income sufficient to indulge that appreciation. But that's not enough: he didn't manage to work out his rage during his youthful stint in the ring, so now he busts kneecaps and cracks skulls to enforce debt collection among the Eastern European immigrant communities of New York City, as a sort of guilty pleasure. On weekends, he dons an apron, fires up his Dacor stainless steel gas range, and attempts to bake soufflés using imported artisanal single origin bittersweet chocolate. They always collapse.

Anyway, you get the point, right? If you haven't got a firm grasp on the essentials of your characters, they're hollow.

I just finished reading The War of the Flowers, by Tad Williams. It's a big ol' sprawling 816-page fantasy epic, because that's what Tad Williams does. The whole thing is driven by a thirty-year-old singer in a not-terribly successful rock band who's realizing that his potential remains unfulfilled and that life is passing him by. Without the hyphens, that's twenty-five words. And everything in the tale flows from that.

Tomorrow, I journey to Ikea, there to acquire the things that will allow me to bring some order to my living space and, most importantly, give me a dedicated place to write. The first thing I'm going to do at that new desk is a series of character sketches in forty words or fewer. I've got eleven chapters, 22,000 words, a solid first-person narrative voice...and I haven't explicitly distilled any of my characters.

So, I'm going to take my own advice, and do that.

I'll let you know how it goes.