A couple days ago I started reading The Deceivers by John D. MacDonald, chosen at random from my huge shelf of old paperbacks.
Very early in the book, two characters, both of whom are readers, have a late night conversation that centers on their mutual dissatisfaction with the ordinariness of their own late 1950s suburban American middle class existence…
I mean that if you take a lot of mealy little people who have already sort of sold their souls down the river before the book even starts, then you can’t really give a very large damn about what happens to them. The author can put them into perfectly frightful situations, and the poor little things can run back and forth, bleating like anything, but you sort of say so what.
(…)
Before something can fall in a dramatic and glorious way, it has to be way the hell up in the air. There has to be a greatness and grandeur about it. And then it falls, and it’s a long time falling, and it makes a glorious and tragic noise when it hits bottom. Hamlet. Richard the Third.
This is the prolific and successful author of thrillers (and a little science fiction) establishing early on in this book that his principle characters aren’t great personages of history like Richard the Third. But, I think, without spoilers, it’s easy to assume that he’s in fact in the process of endowing these characters with at least a version of “greatness and grandeur” that will lift them “way the hell up in the air” out of their petit bourgeois malaise so they can make “a glorious and tragic noise” when they hit bottom.
To me, that sounds like all the character arc anyone ever needs.
But can a couple of otherwise typical contemporary mealy little Americans be lifted up in this way? In “Where My Characters Come From,” Haruki Murakami cautions:
The novelist has to put characters in his novel who feel real and are compelling and speak and act in ways that are a bit unpredictable. A novel with characters who only say and do predictable things isn’t going to attract many readers. Naturally there will be people who feel that novels in which ordinary characters do ordinary things are the really outstanding ones, but (and this is, after all, just my personal preference) I can’t get interested in those kinds of books.
That means, I think, yes, we can start with “mealy little people,” but we better get busy lifting them up in some way or another. These aren’t real people, after all, are they? They’re characters in a novel. It’s the fact of their existence in a fictional context that allows us to move them up the scale from ordinary to grand. “I don’t want to have the terrible limitations of those who live merely from what can make sense,” Clarice Lispector wrote in Água Viva, “Not I: I want an invented truth.”
Me too!
We all need to start with characters who are in one way or another “grounded” but as soon as possible start to lift them out of the ordinary and into… well, wherever the heck you want them to be. However far up in the heavens or down into the hells. But put them there and drop them back down—or shoot them up even higher—because of the decisions they make, and more than that: who they are.
In Growing Great Characters from the Ground Up, our GoodReads Group Read from last month, Martha Engber wrote:
Like buried treasure, extraordinary qualities lay hidden in places that can only be found when characters take action, the more dangerous and difficult the better. And it’s that action—that search—that makes readers so ravenous for more.
And isn’t that because “that action—that search” is what starts to give them a sense of greatness and grandeur?
As always, try to widen your definition of “greatness and grandeur” so that we’re not all stuck writing Richard the Third. There can be a sense of greatness and grandeur in a suburban family drama, a contemporary romance, and so on. Maybe instead of greatness and grandeur should we think in terms of charisma and activity? These are people we’re drawn to, for either their good qualities or their bad. “Characters in fiction aren’t like characters in a sitcom,” wrote Naomi Kanakia in “The Dreariness of Book Club Discussions.” They’re powerful and vital, and they’re beyond likability.” So great doesn’t necessarily mean heroic.
This is about the formation of connection between our readers and our characters, so they achieve a sense of greatness and grandeur, however tempered by realism or modernism. After all, as Robert Charles Wilson told us, “…fiction as an art form is a finely-tuned device for generating a sense of intimacy and pathos in readers—a novel that doesn’t do that, at least to some degree, is fundamentally broken.” And a novel that does do that, creates great, grand characters.
“There is no nobler chore in the universe than holding up a mirror of reality and turning it slightly,” Harlan Ellison wrote in “A Love Song to Jerry Falwell,” “so we have a new and different perception of the commonplace, the everyday, the ‘normal,’ the obvious.”
—Philip Athans
Fantasy Author’s Handbook is now on YouTube!
Did this post make you want to Buy Me A Coffee…
Follow me on Twitter/X @PhilAthans…
Link up with me on LinkedIn…
Join our group on GoodReads…
And our group on Facebook…
Find me at PublishersMarketplace…
Check out my eBay store…
Or contact me for editing, coaching, ghostwriting, and more at Athans & Associates Creative Consulting?
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model.
Where Story Meets World™
Look to Athans & Associates Creative Consulting for story/line/developmental editing at 3¢ per word.
Fantasy Author's Handbook 