How to Write Fiction (3 page)

Writer's workshop 2

How appearance, action and emotion create convincing personae

T
here are four basic groups of exercises here. You will begin by writing about a real person and progressively transform them into a fictional character.

Appearance

The most obvious thing about a person is the way they look, so we'll start with that. Though not very interesting in itself, this is interesting if it lets us guess at something of what they're like.

1
Describe someone you know – a neighbour, a friend – in terms of their appearance: their physical characteristics, the way they dress, the way they move, objects they might have around themselves. Go through your description and mark the items that might be a clue to personality. One test is whether you can ask the question “why” about something you've mentioned.

Now look at the items that aren't clues to anything. Given that you know the personality of this person, is there any way you could change these inexpressive details so that they, too, become clues to personality?

2
Rewrite the description with this in mind. See if there's anything else you can make up that might be a further clue to personality. One way is to borrow characteristics from another person. Think about the people you know and put together a patchwork of characteristics, making sure each one is an indicator of the person's inner life.

Starting with a person you know well has the advantage that you're working from something familiar towards areas where you have to guess or invent. Now let's reverse this process:

3
Write a physical portrait of a stranger you've seen recently. Include everything you can remember, whether or not it seems significant.

Now use these physical facts as the basis for questions. Why does their hair look the way it does? Why are they wearing those clothes or carrying that object? Why do they have that expression on their face? Branch out with further questions.

It's easy to come up with plausible answers, so once you've guessed the obvious, try guessing at the surprising: see what other answers you could come up with for the same questions.

Person becomes character

With that first group of exercises you began the movement away from a literal portrait of a person. The next exercises go further in that direction.

1
Go back to the portrait of the person you know (exercise 2, above). Think of another quirk or characteristic – not one that the real person has. Rewrite your description so that it incorporates the quirk you've identified.

What you have now is no longer a real-life person but a fictional character. As the creator of this character, you know some things about him or her but other things remain blanks. Now you can discover, and invent, what they might be.

2
Sketch out a biography of this character: their childhood, home life, work, close relationships, family. Describe their environment. Then describe a typical day in their life, from waking to going to sleep.

Remember, all this is just background exploration. In a final piece of writing you might not use any of it, but as the writer, you should know it even if the reader doesn't.

We're starting to know a good deal about the external aspects of this character but the most interesting things about both characters and people are their feelings.

3
Start with one of the facts you now know about the character and write about how the character feels about that fact. For example, they might live in a top-floor flat but would really like to live in a small, wooden cottage with a garden.

Feeling is a source of great energy, but writing directly about feeling often doesn't work. One way to get the most out of the energy locked into feeling is to put the feeling inside a character.

4
Think of something you recently experienced that made you feel strongly. Take the same feeling but give the character a completely different cause for experiencing it. You might be enraged by the cynicism of politicians: your character might be enraged at the way the man in front is driving.

Write a short account of what has made your character feel the way he or she does and describe the feelings as the character experiences them.

Giving emotions to a character lets you express them to the full: since they belong to someone else, they can be as unreasonable as you like, exaggeratedly angry, ironic, sad or funny. You can use all the energy of your own feeling but it has a channel to flow through that will make the fiction stronger.

Character in action

So far this has been a very static portrait of a character and there's a limit to what you can discover unless the character can be put in motion. How do you get characters to move?

1
Take your character and describe him or her making a cup of tea, walking down a flight of stairs or waiting for someone. Everyone does these simple things slightly differently and expresses something of their personality in the way they do it. Your character will do the same.

Up to now, we've only learnt about this character through you, the narrator, telling us about him or her. Now it's time to hear the character's own voice.

2
Go back to the exercise above. Rather than just watching the character, this time let's listen to what he or she is thinking while the tea is being made. Describe the activity again, starting with the word “I”.

You might have the character write a letter to someone or describe himself or herself to us. The way the character looks at other characters will reveal a great deal, too.

3
Get your character to describe the stranger you depicted in the first group of exercises. Your character may notice things you hadn't noticed or bring a different set of judgments to the person.

Write a description of the stranger from your character's point of view and see how much you can make the character reveal about himself or herself in what is chosen or ignored.

What people say is important but how they say it is even more important. Do the last two exercises sound like the voice your character would be likely to have, or is it still your voice? Would the character use words differently?

4
Rewrite the last exercise, trying to make the character's voice as convincing as possible and different from your voice. This will be the voice of the character speaking directly to the reader.

Manipulating the reader

Usually, though not always, readers have a feeling about the characters they're reading about: they like them or hate them, trust them or distrust them or vary in their feelings from page to page. In this sense fiction is like life.

But in an important way, fiction is different from life. In life, events just flow along; in fiction, they're shaped to a purpose. That purpose is present in the writer's mind and dictates the choices that the writer makes, many of them unconscious ones. A writer chooses to mention one fact about the character but not another, which means that the reader is only seeing the character through the filter of the writer's mind.

Since manipulation can't be avoided – it is, in fact, what writing is and why writing is different from life – a writer has to learn to be in control of that manipulation. A writer has to learn to make choices that will subtly direct the reader towards the writer's larger purpose.

The writer has two tools for directing the reader: what is described and how it is described. The previous exercises have covered the ground of what is described. Now we come to how it is described.

1
Go back to the first exercise in this workshop. Imagine that in the wider framework of your purpose, you want this character to be disliked by the reader. Rewrite the description, using the same details but expressing them in an unfavourable way. Now reverse the process. Use all the same items in the description but load them with favourable bias.

In two minds

Learning to distinguish between point of view and objective truth is the writer's first step towards creating authentic, resonant work, writes
Rachel Cusk

E
veryone experiences the operation of point of view – how I think and see the world rather than how you do – on a daily basis, yet its function as a technique of prose writing is frequently misunderstood. Creative writing teachers sometimes seem rather embattled on this subject, insisting on the “rule” that the point of view in a continuous prose narration cannot move among characters, even though a great number of canonical literary works rely on the fact that it can and does. This is one of those “rules”, apparently, that is made to be broken.

Yet if one accepts that the construction of a literary work should mirror life as closely as possible, one should indeed start with the proposition that existence is bound to a single “point of view”. The human subject evolves from infancy out of its ability to distinguish itself from what it is not. The first difficult knowledge a baby acquires is the realisation that his mother and he are separate: he cannot control her by means of his own thoughts and desires; he has to cry in order to inform her that he is hungry. In writing, this separation has to be revisited: for invention to be possible, subject and object must be distinguished from one another.

But the writing student is very often reluctant to disinter this harsh human knowledge; indeed, part of the reason why he or she wishes to write may be to escape the very inflexibility that ordains the loneliness of the human subject, the “rule” that dictates that a person cannot merge with other people, that the world in all its reality will not act as a template of projected desire. There is a widespread belief in the power of imagination to unmake that rule, to transcend or transform reality. When children play, they use imagination to do precisely that; but the same student who wishes to reincarnate childhood creativity by writing is often then frustrated by the prose he or she actually produces. It doesn't “look” like what they imagined; however liberating it felt to write them, the pages quickly lose their magic.

The creative writing teacher is not mistaken in ascribing this basic difficulty to a problem with point of view, but it is often the wrong problem that is being identified. As numerous masters have demonstrated, there is nothing “wrong” with the narrative passing from Jane's point of view to John's in the middle of a scene or even of a paragraph. The problem arises where the concept of point of view itself – rather than any particular version of it – has been inadequately realised. What Jane thinks is one thing; what actually is, is another. Point of view, like all techniques of fiction, has to reflect our own experience of living, and our experience is as human subjects in a world whose objective reality we are unable to breach. Jane might like the Tuscan countryside; John might hate it; but the actual value of the Tuscan countryside is something that has to be established in the writer's mind outside of John or Jane's opinion of it. John and Jane can then be brought in to reflect, contradict or debate its worth, but if the writer has not managed first to separate John and Jane from the Tuscan countryside – to separate the perceiver from the object perceived, as the baby is separated from the mother – then the resulting fiction will seem “unrealistic” and dissatisfying. To construct a point of view, in other words, first you must establish what is not a matter of opinion, what is true. This is, obviously, a tall order, but it is nonetheless what a great writer spends most of his or her time thinking about, before constructing the story that will reflect this fundamental distinction.

There are writers whose opinions happen to chime with those of the majority and, while their mishandling of point of view can go unnoticed, the success of their writing depends on their remaining in “safe” areas. A novel in which a character takes an idiosyncratic attitude to the Tuscan countryside is more distinctive simply because the author proves at one stroke that he understands how to use point of view.

Some writers find it difficult or do not wish to relinquish their subjectivity: a more objective way of perceiving the world seems to them comfortless and cold. In this case the problems of point of view are often approached by portioning up the terrain of the novel into chapters or sections that “belong” to different characters. Sometimes these sections will be headed with the character's name in order to make the writer's position clear. The differences between Jane and John are resolved through enforced separation. The reader is made to travel between their points of view, spending half the time with Jane and her love of the Tuscan countryside and half the time with John and his loathing of it. This may be a fair solution, but it can seem brittle compared to the great organic enterprise that is the novel at its best.

A novel dominated by point of view often lacks the feeling of space and freedom, of security in the world, that permits the reader to transcend themselves, to grow and change by living for a period in the narrative. A writer such as DH Lawrence, himself the most flagrant offender in the English language against the “rules” of point of view, offers this space and freedom in abundance; indeed, one is freer to hate Lawrence than any other writer I can think of, and this in itself is proof that point of view not only survives but is strengthened by his fiction. Lawrence's prose moves through his characters like a river moving through the landscape, intimate with but never confined by them. One can learn from him, at least, not to be limited by point of view, just as we try not to allow our own or others' perceptions to obscure or limit our true understanding of the world.

Rachel Cusk is the author of two works of non-fiction and six novels, including The Lucky Ones (shortlisted for the Whitbread novel award) and Arlington Park (shortlisted for the Orange prize for fiction). Her most recent novel, The Bradshaw Variations, is published by Faber