Last week we posted an interview with Harmoni McGlothlin, writer and writing enthusiast, whose website is connecting writers and offering publishing opportunities. This week, she adds her viewpoint on writing strong characters to our fiction article archive by looking into the narrator in the film Fight Club based on a book by Chuck Palahniuk. If you haven’t seen the film, you can watch trailers.

Writing Gritty Characters
by Harmoni McGlothlin

A Synopsis Of The Film Fight Club
**SPOILER ALERT! This synopsis gives away major plot twists!**

The narrator, an average guy, develops a serious case of insomnia when his cubicle starts to feel like a prison and his possessions seem to, in fact, possess him. While the narrator is on his way home from a business trip, wondering if he’ll every sleep again, his condo mysteriously explodes, reducing all the paraphernalia of his mail-order life to a pile of rubble. Lost without the possessions that defined him, the sterile home that meant so much and so little at the same time, the narrator reluctantly picks up the phone and dials the only number in his wallet.

 Tyler Durden, an acquaintance of mere hours, represents everything this narrator longs for; he’s powerful, strong-willed, and completely free of the claustrophobic cubicles of 9-5 workdays and the enslaving digits of a balanced checkbook. The two soon develop a brotherly bond, a rapidly deteriorating yin and yang, and together organize an underground group, a fight club. The fight club revolves around the philosophy that a man can only be free when he’s given up everything; that to bleed and to cause bloodshed is to embrace your own insignificance and that only by doing so can you ever truly live. Liberated from possessions, his cubicle, the trappings of morality, and the ideas handed down to him from father to son since the dawn of time, he now believes he’s found something far more valuable — himself. The narrator sleeps like a baby for the first time in a long time.

But as the fight club evolves, the narrator soon realizes that the rules and structure laid down so carefully by Tyler were created to protect him from the truth: He and Tyler are one person. He is Tyler.

Could the narrator, this average guy, have invented Tyler in order to free himself from a life he hated, a self he hated? While he thought he was asleep, he’d actually been busy (or Tyler had been busy) organizing an operation of dreadful proportions, something far more sinister than bare-knuckle boxing and harmless pranks against corporations. Now the narrator is challenged with the unimaginable — how to prevent himself from crossing the line between liberation and mass destruction.

****

I felt like putting a bullet between the eyes of every Panda that wouldn’t screw to save its species. I wanted to open the dump valves on oil tankers and smother all those French beaches I’d never see. I wanted to breathe smoke. I wanted to destroy something beautiful. –Narrator, Fight Club

These few lines are a great example of compelling character writing. These lines say something valuable and meaningful about the narrator. More importantly, it’s said in a voice that demands attention and rings true on a level so full of human grit it’s as organic as sweat or semen. This character’s voice, in a matter of forty-eight words, resonates for the audience like pounding footsteps on pavement. The truth of a character should be like a glaring light to the readers’ eyes, something that stings the reader but is impossible to turn away from.

However, recognizing and accomplishing great character writing are two entirely different things. Let’s pull the wings off the insect and dissect it, shall we?

The first place to start when trying to establish a unique character is summarizing their most defining characteristic. A well-written character has many traits but there should be one that molds all others. Is he a cynic? Optimist? A nihilist? Pessimist? Christian? Satanist? Necrophiliac? This trait, the defining trait of the character, will shape every word the character chooses, every gesture they make, every stance they take both physically and mentally. All great characters are multi-layered and should have many pronounced attributes but there should be one that all others either stem from or work against.

Here are some observations, continuing to use Fight Club as an example.

1. The narrator is nameless. This character’s worldview is one of hopeless cynicism. He despises the daily grind, the plasticity all around him, the superficial quality of the world at large. He despises his own role in that world, his own preoccupation with material things. Therefore, he removes himself from it. He has no identity. Early in the story, even his posture seeks to avoid becoming enmeshed with those around him: I had it all. Even the glass dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections, proof that they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working, indigenous peoples of . . . wherever.

2. The narrator uses specific language, which reflects this worldview, shaping every thought he has and the way he presents it. Even the reference to his boss wearing a “cornflower blue” necktie on Mondays is an expression of his loathing; that he lives in a world where even a person’s wardrobe, down to the last shade of blue, is compartmentalized.

3. The narrator also uses specific language when referring to other characters. He consistently refers to Marla Singer as “Marla Singer,” not just “Marla.” His loathing of her is so total that using her full name is an extension of this. Complete. Whole.

4. The narrator has a psychological build as unique to him as any living, breathing person. Why does the Narrator despise Marla Singer so entirely when she does not represent, in any way, the world upon which he has turned his back? With a cigarette constantly clinging to her lips and a second-hand dress drooping from her lanky frame, she genuinely lacks the falsehood and unflinching denial that the narrator is rebelling against: Marla’s philosophy of life was that she might die at any moment. The tragedy, she said, was that she didn’t.

Isn’t she, to some degree, exactly what the narrator wishes to uphold and to realize? This is where “sub- traits” or “conflicting traits” come strongly into play. While, throughout this story, the Narrator seems to loathe everything outside of himself– he also loathes himself. Marla Singer represents something deeper to our character: she is a manifestation of his self-loathing. The two met as a result of the same sad obsession with sitting in on self-help groups for people with terminal and life-altering illnesses, both feeding off the pain of others in order to release their own pain, pretending to be truly afflicted while in reality nothing could be further from the truth. Marla is, in essence, a reflection of the narrators’ worst qualities: neediness, loneliness, misery.

5. The Narrator evolves throughout the story. He seeks an escape and he finds it, frees himself of all that he loathes. He walks away from the world at large and as he does so, his language, his posture, and his behavior reflects this: After a night in fight club, everything in the real world gets the volume turned down. Nothing can piss you off. Your word is law, and if other people break that law or question you, even that doesn’t piss you off.

He walks with his head held high and a beat to his step that mimics the beat to his words. He challenges the authorities, which once ruled his ordinary life.

6. Finally, this may be the most important aspect of it all: The narrator is not some random character living some random story. This is not some ordinary man overcoming extraordinary circumstances. This is a character whose task is to overcome himself, to choose between his most sinister desires and what he knows is “right.” The story is twisted and compelling, always, but it revolves around the character. The narrator’s personality shapes the events that unfold and he, in turn, is shaped by them. Integration is key. This narrator creates an alter ego in order to escape what he considers to be his own flaws. He is deconstructed and resurrected all within his own psyche. He is his own nemesis: May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect. Deliver me, Tyler, from being perfect and complete.

Your character has to live and breathe inside your imagination before he can make his way inside the reader’s mind. If you don’t know him inside and out, no one else ever will.

Fight Club’s narrator tells us:

I met God across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on the wall behind him, and God asks me, ‘Why?’ Why did I cause so much pain? Didn’t I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness? Can’t I see how we’re all manifestations of love? I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God’s got this all wrong. We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens. And God says, ‘No, that’s not right.’ Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can’t teach God anything

What would your character say if he or she were speaking with “God”?

****

Although most of us do not set out to write characters who are as outside the norm as the narrator in Fight Club, and we may not write absurdist, satirical or edgy pieces, we do need to make something of importance be at stake for our characters (and in nonfiction the “I” of our pieces). Answering Harmoni’s closing question will give you a big boost for focusing your character and maintaining that focus, whether the character is in or outside the mainstream.