JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #57
June 24, 2021
I think the writing of fiction requires an author to engage a kind of expansive, encompassing Stanislavski "method" in "the art of experiencing" the lives of every one of his characters in order to best portray the fictional situation.
Years ago, I was writing a novel I never managed to sell, but I often think about the process of writing a particular scene in it. The story was written in the first person, so everything had to be filtered through that point of view. And then a new character walked into the scene who was meant to be a kind of mirror for the POV character, someone who was just then embarking on the situation the POV character was beginning to be disillusioned with. There is immediate antagonism between the two characters because they each recognize themselves in the other, the POV character in the naivete of the newcomer, and the new character in the disillusionment of the POV character. But none of that is conscious. I remember a difficult bifurcation (trifurcation?) in my mind as I wrote the scene: trying to experience what the POV character understood about the new character and how she would portray that for the reader, while simultaneously trying to experience what the new character was going through and slipping some of that into the POV’s character’s portrayal of the scene as unnoticed "tells" that would let the reader see through the POV character’s unreliable perspective and glimpse some of what was really going on in the new character’s mind. Unfortunately that novel is collecting dust in a box on the shelf behind me, so no one gets to see if I managed to pull it off.
Although each character serves a narrative function within the framework of the story, my job as the writer is to create an experience for the reader in which they can vicariously live another life, and in order to do that, I have to subsume myself to that alternate life, work out the experience of it for myself, in order to put it down on the page.
Next: On the Deus Ex Machina