Developing Character in a Deeper Way

And what happens when you find out your book isn't very good...

A behind the scenes post on hearing, from a dear therapist, that my book isn’t good, and how it sells anyway, and a step by step teaching on deepening character.

It was a done deal. Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, was publishing my first memoir tentatively titled Jennifer Juniper (after the Donovan song by the same name…I know, I know…🙄). The date of release would be the following spring. Rita…the agent, you’ll recall, who did not like my book…had set aside her distaste and negotiated a solid contract to include her handy-dandy fee of fifteen perfect. Signed, sealed, and delivered, a check had arrived and was promptly deposited into our family account.

Next steps included a legal read, a copy edit, and “building buzz” inside the publishing house. This was not a term I would ever use, but Kim used it a lot. Building buzz meant everyone at S&S—from the lawyers to foreign rights people, from marketers to promotors, from booksellers to the executive staff—would be on our side. Getting a whole house behind a book could take it “all the way,” meaning to The New York Times bestseller list and Oprah. Kim even had hopes for international sales.

Her ambitions for me were endearing but also seemed…unrealistic? I mean, come on…this was my first book. Still, who could complain about such an advocate? Not me. I was grateful for Kim and her unbounded enthusiasm. She was a blessing.

On the home front, I enjoyed a momentary and much-needed break from the intensity of the last four years of conceiving the idea to write about my life, learning creative writing, and finally finishing a book and selling it. It had been more challenging than I could have imagined, but I had done it. And with thirty grand of my money in our bank account, Steve was silenced. No more “when are you going to make money?” and “I married a partner, not a dependent.” I, for the moment, had pulled my weight.

(Remember a couple of weeks back, and all that I wrote about keeping the reader on your side by providing context…well, guess what…I’m going to put that teaching into action right now. So…heads up! )

Steve Dorsey, my husband and the father of my son, was a young man from a blue-collar family. His father worked a full-time job for Hyster and was on the road several days a week repairing farm machinery. When he came home, he smelled of grease and sweat. His nails dirty, his hands calloused, but what did Steve’s dad do on the weekends? He mowed lawns and plowed fields. Anything to make a few extra bucks. Steve’s mother was no slouch either; she cut hair out of her house for money and then ran her own bakery and cake decorating business. Steve, the oldest of two children, had been earning his own money since he was ten: selling seeds, mowing lawns, babysitting, and fixing up and selling bikes.

Going further back, this family was of humble beginnings. Steve’s mother grew up in rural Idaho, one of a dozen kids in a home with a dirt floor and no running water. His father was the youngest of four and grew up on a cattle ranch in Nebraska. Though they lived in different regions, his parents came up in the depression era with its horrifying starvation and collective poverty. The terror of those times lived in Steve’s cells and, in many ways, defined him. Growing up, money wasn’t deposited into banks; it was stuffed into jars and hidden under floorboards and mattresses.

Steve’s plan since childhood had been to catapult himself as far from that stinking terror of poverty as possible. He was the first of his family on both sides to go to college and had one vision for himself: Security.

Steve didn’t want me to make money; he needed me to make money like a thirsty man needs water. My earning and doing so consistently meant survival for him. Money was his identity…

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Let’s take a big old break in the action now…

See what I just did there…see how I went back and cracked open this guy (my primary antagonistic force, BTW) to give him a hella-mountain of background in order to put his hammering me about money into some perspective? See how by doing this, you go from kind of hating the guy to kind of loving him? Or at least relating to him? Or even feeling sorry for him?

That’s another reason to do this kind of depth work in our memoirs. People are complex. People have weaknesses. People are idiots about certain things. Me. Steve. You. Your friends, lovers, parents. That’s being human. Memoir demands deep character development because the reader knows you will tilt your story toward your own bias’. By the very nature of the form, you lack a certain credibility.

What I’ve written above about Steve isn’t great writing, it’s not finessed as I might do in a book, but I am hopeful it provides a solid example of how to get the job done.

When writing your memoir, or essay, try to push yourself to “rif” about your characters and why they might have the fears they have.

Is it hard to write this way? Of course, it is. After all, the people who hurt us (or who we let hurt us) were pains-in-the-neck, and yeah, they got under our skin like blood-sucking tic's…but when you are writing about someone, anyone (even a barista or a parking attendant) why not dig in there and let the reader know them.

Yes, you might lose face. You might see that the other person wasn’t entirely to blame and that you had a hand in it too. You might even stumble onto your shared humanity and find yourself softening ever so slightly. That’s good. That’s helpful. That’s the point of this art form…isn’t it? I mean, are we writing to testify or to understand our experience and glean wisdom? These questions alone are essential. Ask them of yourself and be honest. Why are you writing about your life?

I once had a writer study at the Studio who was set on the person she wrote about being “the devil” and herself being a “victim.” She refused to create a complex character out of that person. The reader was to accept that there was pure evil incarnate. Period. The humanity of that pure evil incarnate didn’t exist.

Okay. I get it. There are some traumas so intense, so powerful, so life-altering that to soften toward the perpetrator is simply unacceptable…or is it?

Think of Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, and Christ. These people understood something about human nature and the power of love. To demonize/victimize is to simplify experience.

Knowing this can help the memoir writer do the underlying work, which is to present a fair and balanced story.

As for me, I had a hand in Steve’s obsession with money. I played right into his neurosis by trying to meet it and, worse, fed it (as you’ll soon see). His fixation became my fixation. His fear became my fear. Knowing these truths helps me in my storytelling.

Let’s say you don’t know how to get to this depth yet. Let’s say this is all new to you—a few suggestions.

1. Write backstory about characters that bug you. If you don’t know it, make up a story that might explain why they are the way they are.

2. Try a few interview questions. This idea comes from Story Engineering by Larry Brooks, who calls it The Character Interview.

Character Interview:

What is your character’s backstory, the experiences that programmed how he/she thinks and feels and acts today?

What is his inner demon, and how does it influence decisions and actions in the face of the outer demon you are about to throw at him?

What does he/she resent?                                                                               

What is his/her drive to get revenge?

How does he/she feel about himself, and what is the gap between that assessment and how others feel about him/her?

(Here is the complete PDF.)

Character Interview Class 4

15.5KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

3. Write from the perspective of the other character. For example, I could write from Steve’s point of view for a while if I struggled to give him depth and complexity.

4. Allow your characters more action in your story, that is more dialogue than commentary about them. Let their words, via dialogue, show the reader who they are on the page.

If you have any other suggestions for creating more complex characters in your memoir writing, please share them. I’d love to hear.

Okay, back to the story at hand…

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…now hang the idea of writing and publishing a book around the neck of a guy like Steve who didn’t read more than USA Today and The Oregonian. Steve wasn’t a scholar or an academic. He was a fix-it guy, a mechanic, and an auctioneer on the road several days of the week, looking good on stage and barking into a microphone. Writers, writing, and publishing was as far from his idea of life as Mars is from planet Earth.

He wasn’t seemingly unsupportive. Steve was (and would say it today) full-throatedly unsupportive. He wanted me to be done writing. To stop! If I had wanted to open a bakery, or cut hair, as his mother had once done…that would have been great. Steve would have been all for it. But my call to be a writer was a pain in his butt. He hated it at the time, and all these years later, my path still makes zero sense to him, even with all my successes.

So, with the sale of my book, I had finally managed to earn a break from Steve’s non-stop worry about money and his underlying unhappiness with my career path. With thirty grand, I bought myself some peace.

Then two things happened. Shocking. Surprising.

My therapist told me the book was “not good.” And the Forest for the Trees group finally came back with a whole pile of suggestions.

“I mean, it’s good,” the readers from the Forest group said, “but…it could be better.”

My therapist was easy to discount; after all, I told myself at the time, he was an old guy who was crazily out of touch with trends. I liked him, and he was a published author of a memoir titled Becoming Brothers, but his book was written like a psychology text, not a memoir with a literary underbelly.

But the Forest for the Trees group was another thing altogether. These were terrific writers, published writers, and men and women I respected. Their only fault had been taking so long to read my book and get back to me. Who would have known I would dash out during the so-called break and sell the damn thing?

Crestfallen is how I felt leaving the group that day. With a moving box full of my returned manuscripts in the back seat, each one marked up with notes and edits and advice, I drove home in a fog, realizing I had made a crucial mistake. I let my hunger to get published override my good sense and humility because everyone who made comments about the state of that book was right. It did drag in the opening. There was something overly sentimental about the POV. And there were critical moments when the adult Jennifer could have inserted herself into the prose and put specific events into necessary perspective. (All of these comments would later be part of critical reviews published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and a few other publications).

In sum, the Forest for the Trees group echoed (with more specificity) Rita’s comments about my book “not being very good.” This woman who I kind of hated had told me the truth. My book, though sold and on its way through the complex journey to publication, wasn’t very good. Sure, it was good enough to get published, but damn, damn, damn…it could have been so much better. If only I hadn’t been so impatient, even desperate in my pursuit of publication to placate Steve. If only I had waited. If only I hadn’t signed that contract.

Hauling that box of manuscripts into the house, I remember going directly to my office and calling Kim to tell her what I had learned.

“Can we take it through a revision?” I asked.

“No,” was Kim’s simple and honest answer. “It’s not your book anymore. It’s ours.”

Thanks for being with me. More to come, J.