on character building
welcome to my workshop
“In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!"
— Anton Chekhov in a letter to his brother Alexander
Like everyone else in the stratosphere, I’ve half-listened to the audiobook Atomic Habits. So I get the key to a good life is conditioning yourself to do things automatically rather than waiting for the impulse to arrive, which may or may not ever happen, causing everything to spin out of control until you die in a basement apartment pinned under a pile of yellowed newspapers and your cat eats your face.
So.
As as a kind of spring cleaning of the mind, I’ve decided to turn Wednesday into Workshop Day here on Juvenescence. If you’re reading this because you’re part of my Memoir Club then consider this your call to arms.
Yes I know it’s Thursday — I’m sorry. I meant to post this yesterday then a whole bunch of unexpected stuff happened and I got distracted but anyway here I am. As the call centre people say, ‘Please bear with…’
No pressure if you don’t fancy doing it. I’m not big on homework myself. I just know that some of you like structure so I thought I’d give you the option.
But I don’t need characters, I’m writing a memoir! you might be thinking. That’s just where you’re wrong. Because every story, whether it’s dystopian fantasy fiction or documentary truth, requires characters to function well. As readers we need people to cling to and shrink from, people to cheer for, to lust after and be irritated by, people to love and to loathe (ideally at the same time1).
Any novelist can tell you that fictional characters are drawn observed truths. Jane Austen’s Emma, Shakespeare’s King Lear did not spring from their author’s minds fully formed like mythic gods. They were constructed, cobbled together from attributes their authors had observed, consciously or unconsciously, from real people they’d met in real life, or fictional characters they’d encountered in books who were composed from real people in turn. A less apparent truth is that the people a writer depicts in memoir (or any kind of narrative non-fiction) are built in a similar but inverted way. A reverse-engineered version of the fictional character-building process, you might say.
The trick of capturing real people and rendering a version of them effectively on the page (“pinning them like butterflies,” as the writer Cathrin Bradbury put it in her author interview) is a process of reduction rather than collection. While the novelist cobbles and pieces together like a magpie, the memoirist rifles through the enormous overflowing steamer trunk of memory editing and discarding until the jumble is reduced to handful of glinting treasures. A gesture, a sound, a scent, an image. The devil, as always, is in the details, the more acute the better.
The question is how to choose?