When They Won’t Speak
When a key character plops onto the page–silent and defiant.
Lisbon 2017
Sometimes they simply won’t speak. Even with a nudge, a cajole, after a shove and demand, there’s still silence. A writer has birthed a new world, one with tension and intrigue and drama, yet a key character plops onto the page–silent and defiant. So the writer decides to scribble a few more lines. Adds some description. Abuses the delete key. Takes a quick walk. But that character remains voiceless.
Here is a dilemma that would have befuddled Nabokov, who notably said that his “characters are galley slaves” in his Paris Review interview. He was responding to a question about E. M. Foster’s claim that his characters occasionally take over and dictate the direction of his novels. Although the cast in a Nabokov novel may be confined to a rather dreadful, inhumane penal colony, that seems—like much with Nabokov—to be the exception: most writers live in cells, the characters are the guards.
For readers, the birthing of characters, those of full and rich and complicated lives, may seem a mysterious, convoluted process. To give a voice is to inhabit that character, an instinct that’s closer to acting than directing. A good description of the attitude required comes from an interview with John le Carré, where the invention of a character results from “examining the possibilities of ones own character.” The writer looks inward, imagines situations, slight changes, emotional drives, and projects outward, extrapolating to the fictional world. A view that mediates on the past and toys with variables: Who would I have become? With a different background? With a different environment? If I received the wrong advice? If I responded differently?
The drive to creation comes from shadows, hints, shavings—the inspection of a sensation, and the enlargement of that sensation. Consider, for instance, a time in your past when you were consumed with anger: recall the passion, the zeal, the urge. Can you transpose that spirit to another situation?
Although it’s never described as the creation of a character, everyone already tries that last step. To imagine a potential future and your reaction is to envision a potential character. How to respond during an interview? What to say during dinner? After this happens, that will happen. Looking into the past is just as illuminating for creation: If I would have said this, he would have said that. It would have been funnier if I said it differently.
All of these visions and speculations and schemes are the methods of the fiction writer. And the fiction writer knows that when the character simply refuses to speak, when the pen remains perched, the fault is with the holder: what’s missing is the unexamined sensation, the one the writer refuses to explore.
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