Wednesday, August 14, 2019

Windows to Reveal (Just Enough about) Mysterious Characters

In Moby Dick, Captain Ahab doesn't show up until after the ship has been at sea for days. And it's chapter 28.

Talk about intriguing. Talk about building the tension. Herman Melville was not afraid to withhold information, and that practice can especially valuable when you have a character who must be bigger than life. By leaving things out, readers' imaginations are engaged and can create dimensions that are deep, meaningful, and personal.

When I was a kid, most of the horror movies did not share the monsters. They hinted at them, making them all the more terrifying.

One important tool for providing some but not all information about a character is using other characters as windows. These provide readers with indirect (and incomplete) experiences of mysterious characters. Their filters give readers the option to pick and choose between descriptions, characterizations, and opinions. This permits them to assemble their own images (and can, with the best of fiction, reward revisiting these stories over the years).

If you make the right choice, the window can be a single person, as with Nick Carraway who narrates The Great Gatsby. Though Nick has direct experience of Gatsby, much of what he gathers about that character comes from rumors and the statements of others. His interest, skepticism, and opinions all shape, without defining too much, our own experiences of Gatsby.

Citizen Kane doesn't begin until after Kane is already dead. The story is basically told as a series of interviews, dramatized by flashbacks, with people who had contact with Kane. The interviewer, Jerry Thompson (who is mysterious in his own way, never seen on camera), has had no direct experience of Kane. The testimony of others provides windows into who Kane was. These are shaped by the questions the interviewer asks, but not by his providing his own point of view. (Of course, there is an ironic perspective as well. The viewers of the film know the Rosebud answer, something which is never learned by the interviewer.) The windows approach is recreated by the film’s promo, in which Welles is heard, but never seen.

How do you choose your windows to best present an intriguing character? Having a naïve character, probably the narrator, is a very effective starting point. This character, like your reader, is seeking knowledge. I think it's good to have characters who have biases as well. It's tricky to handle unreliable characters, but, if you balance them, with advocates and enemies, victims and beneficiaries, skeptics and believers, these can give you powerful ways to provide the right mix of hints to deliver a memorable character.

Of course, this technique works for characters who aren't so mysterious. More might be learned about a shy character from his or her friends than from direct experiences. Think of Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird. Or an inarticulate character, like Edgar in Men in Black. Or a neuro-diverse character. Or someone suffering from memory problems.

I love how, in Roger Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber, the protagonist, Corwin, discovers who he is, often through other people. We discover who he is at the same time, and the brilliant twist in the story is how Corwin comes to dislike who he was and reform himself.

Using characters as windows into other characters are does not need to be limited to characters who have a lot of hidden aspects. Windows can be used for any important characters in your stories. But, at least as an exercise, it's worth considering creating a character who is mysterious and discovering how to balance hints and scope for imagination when giving readers a direct experience of characters is deliberately limited.

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