Last week we explored story ideas and ways to develop them by establishing a narrative line and a time frame. This week we are going to think about the story’s protagonist, his or her nature, dilemmas and settings. In following weeks, we’ll focus on plot, story arc, dialog, tone, and further character development. Whether you are starting a new story, revising an older one, or just wondering how fiction writers go about creating memorable stories, these exercises will help.

As an analogy, imagine that you are practicing to become a competitive golfer. Golfers who are serious about improving their game spend time practicing the individual parts of it — the approach shot, hitting out of a sand trap, practicing uphill and downhill lies — because they know that the total game depends on their mastery of the individual elements. That’s what these exercises are about — strengthening the individual elements.

If you are eager to start writing a story, you can certainly do the exercises and continue from what they yield, working in a back and forth approach — write what you are imagining, use the exercises to imagine more, and then incorporate the exercise results into the story where fitting. Whether you do all of the exercises before you begin your story or use the back and forth approach, you will be strengthening your storytelling and fiction writing abilities.

 In fact, even if you are a strictly nonfiction writer, time spent practicing the elements of good fiction will benefit your writing. Creative nonfiction is enhanced by clear story structure, drawing sympathetic characters, using dialog well, writing in scene and having a keen ear for tone. The exercises and discussion we’ll have over the next few weeks should prove useful to all of you actively pursuing prose writing.

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By this week, you have a narrative line and a time frame in mind for either a hypothetical story or one you are actively writing. Either way, let’s focus on the protagonist of the story.

Learn to Love Your Protagonist

As much as our teachers taught us to think of literature in terms of overarching values and themes, as authors, we have to set out to accomplish something much humbler. As J. Madison Davis puts it in his book Novelist’s Essential Guide to Creating Plot:

If you ask a novelist what she is writing about, she will say, “A guy who tries to rob Fort Knox.” If you ask someone who isn’t a novelist, he will say, “It’s about the materialism of the American middle class.” The latter person should be writing philosophy or something, but until he learns to love guys who plan to rob Fort Knox, he won’t be a novelist.

If we succeed in our effort to keep our eyes on our character, themes and meaning will develop and become accessible to the reader. But by the time professors and critics are explicating the themes they discover, we’ll be onto another story, thinking not about betrayal and loyalty but about “a woman whose husband has been leading a double life as a bank robber.”

In Writing Shapely Fiction, Jerome Stern suggests we get close to what makes our protagonist tick by having the protagonist tell an anecdote. However, it has to be one in which the protagonist feels compelled to cover up confusion, love, shame or fear or other strong emotions. People don’t want to see negative outcomes as their fault; they don’t want to appear uninformed or inadequate. Jerome Stern suggests we make our protagonist talk in a way that readers see what it is the protagonist doesn’t want to face despite the cover up.

This writing approach leads to a whole story for Ron Carlson: “Bigfoot Stole My Wife.” You can read the story online. In it, a man comes home and finds his wife gone and is certain Bigfoot stole her, though while he is describing the scene of his homecoming as a theft by the creature, we easily see through his most likely improbable explanation to the more likely explanation he cannot see:

In the two and a half years we were married, I often had the feeling that I would come home from the track and something would be funny. Oh, she’d say things: One of these days I’m not going to be here when you get home, things like that, things like everybody says. How stupid of me not to see them as omens. When I’d get out of bed in the early afternoon, I’d stand right here at this sink and I could see her working in her garden in her cut-off Levis and bikini top, weeding, planting, watering. I mean it was obvious. I was too busy thinking about the races, weighing the odds, checking the jockey roster to see what I now know: he was watching her too. He’d probably been watching her all summer.

 In an example of a different kind of unreliability, the protagonist in Sarah Rakel Orton’s short story “Scars and Scales” in the January 2010 The Sun magazine begins:

…and I, ducking into shadows, carry a platter of beef roast, so raw I can smell the blood, to the edge of the backyard swimming pool. Already Dad has reached the shallow end, and my younger twin brothers, Michelangelo and Leonardo — my mother had a passion for art — are not far behind. I coo to them; their tails move from side to side in anticipation. I sit on the cement and carefully — I have learned to be careful — extend the beef into Dad’s open, hungry jaws. Michael and Leo scramble over, snapping teeth and hissing.

When we read that opening we may think we are reading a metaphor for the way an oldest daughter sees the men in her family or we may think we are reading about a family of crocodiles or badgers. We don’t really know why the I, who brings the meat, sees her father and brothers as amphibians or water mammals requiring raw meat. Later, we’ll learn that the protagonists’ mother has died three months earlier, and this “unreliable” description of her family is a sign of her mental illness.

Think about the story we introduced last week in which the daughter refuses the treatments doctors advise for her mother, only to have her mother burn their house down. How does she feel — responsible for causing the problem since she took her mother out of the hospital? Afraid of being blamed? How might she excuse or explain her mother’s actions? If she were forced to explain what happened to a sheriff or the doctors, in trying to convince them that it was an accident, she might become an unreliable narrator, completely believing her story. In it, though, she might “accidentally” reveal details and perceptions with clues that her mother was planning this action.

Your Turn
Look at the story you developed last week. Think about your protagonist in any of the situations the story might entail and what he or she doesn’t want to reveal. To write a monologue from this protagonist’s point of view, have the protagonist exaggerating, excusing, or lying to cover up a feeling or action.

Ron Carlson’s character has to explain why his wife is not there in a way that lets him off the hook: I came home, saw my wife was gone, and figured out Big Foot stole her because I could smell him (not how dirty his house might have been from his own messy ways), and I put a lot of clues that this would happen together using hindsight (faulty), and now I am warning others (rather than admit my wife was sick of our life together).

What is it your protagonist says under the pressure of covering something up?

Drop Your Protagonist into a Difficult Moment

Now, pick an emotional moment in the life of your protagonist, one where he or she is unsure, embarrassed or afraid and write the action of that moment. For my story of the girl leaving home with her boyfriend, it might be:
Smita boarded the bus a step behind Zarapet, her sari too thin for the cold Minnesota night. As soon as they found their seats, Zarapet told her he was returning to the terminal for something.
After you have set your character in the tumultuous moment, write on, giving the character something to do as she or he processes their emotion:

Smita stared at Zarapet’s back as he walked toward the door of the bus. One passenger pulled his leg quickly out of the aisle. Another’s coat swayed a little from where Zarapet had brushed by. Smita placed the basket of food she’d prepared for the trip on the empty seat beside her. Through the window, she could see the driver talking with a dispatcher. As she stared, she noticed child-sized handprints on the window glass beside her. Feeling as if other people’s eyes were on her, she opened the food basket to check on the pot of lentils she’d cooked extra thick so they wouldn’t drip as she and Zarapat scooped them with naan. They hadn’t spilled over. Smelling them, she realized how much she missed her family, the crackle of seeds popping in hot oil on this rainy day, her uncles’ voices as they argued with her father about soccer and politics. She began counting seconds. Was Zarapet coming back? As cold as she felt, she was glad the door was still open — there was still time for him to return. She could smell the rain that reminded her of the kind of day on which her mother would make poori. Handprints on the window beside her seemed like the prints of ghosts, of children waving to help her to see something. Clutching her food basket, she rose and walked briskly toward the open door.

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In this scene, what Smita has to do is limited to what she can do from her seat, see what she can see from there, smell what she can smell from there. Writing in scene, you quickly learn that the way characters interact with an environment helps you reveal who they are as well as their dilemmas. But very importantly, it also provides you with tools for creating a world that the reader enters and stays in. In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner famously writes:

The most important single notion in the theory of fiction I have outlined — essentially the traditional theory of our civilization’s literature — is that of the vivid and continuous fictional dream. According to this notion, the writer sets up a dramatized action in which we are given the signals that make us “see” the setting, characters, and events.

Your Turn
Take your paragraph from the previous exercise and extend your character’s interaction with the environment he or she is in. There will be things to touch, manipulate, look at, listen to, taste, and smell. All of the interactions with what’s around the character will be avenues for letting the reader know the character’s dilemma, personality, background and emotional state.

Now that you have spun a synopsis of a story, learned a little about its main character and experimented with a way to begin building a fictional dream by evoking the setting through the character’s actions in a particular environment, you’ll get to look into further as fiction writers do as we talk in the weeks ahead about the other elements of story that compel readers. In addition to inventing and developing memorable characters, situations and settings, fiction writers concentrate on a story structure with obstacles, definite points of view, believable dialog, and tone that entertains and absorbs the reader but doesn’t break the fictional dream.