How to meet your characters, part one

Jealousy as plot

I often tell students that I start short stories and novels with either conceit or character. Conceit might mean a situation, e.g., I want to write about some aunties and uncles doing mushrooms, or a speculative element, e.g., I want to write about a tour guide at an Indian cave site who turns to stone overnight. Often, when I start with conceit, I work backwards and find the characters who fill out that conceit.

When I start with character, as I did in the case of my second novel¹ and as I’ve been doing a lot with short fiction recently, it’s looser. I have to find a way to “meet” characters, to do so at the right moment in their lives, and then to inhabit those people — ideally people who are not me, or not exactly me — in a way that generates narrative momentum.

In my classes, I often start by asking students what craft challenges they want to work on. Many say they are struggling with “character.” This used to surprise me. Character, I think, is the reason many of us come to fiction at all. We crave the slippery intimacy of being inside someone else’s head. We might believe in fiction’s capacity to generate empathy, or to be a kind of compassion meditation. We might just be incurable gossips who can’t help but want to watch other people fall in love or fall apart.

I think what those students are actually talking about is how to meet their characters, and how to turn characters into plot. Because writing character-driven fiction is not just about imagining people as static portraits; it’s about living with the people you’ve imagined, following them into the varied nooks and crannies of their lives, and letting them surprise you.

So, for the next few months, or until I get bored of it, I’ve decided to focus my monthly craft newsletters on this very common fictional challenge — character. Each month, I’ll “close-read” a story with you, and end with a prompt that ought to help you write a story in the tradition of the one you just read, drawing on that piece’s emotional energy, thematic interest, or structure. If you read and write along with me in these newsletters, you should get good practice in reading for craft, and you should also get some writing out of it.

This month: jealousy. What is it good for? A lot.

Craft essays and writing prompts take a second to assemble! For that reason, I paywall the more labor-intensive installments of “Only ugly first drafts.” If you’re a paid subscriber, thank you for helping to make this work possible!