INHABITING YOUR CHARACTERS

November 10, 2022 | By Women Writers Women Books | Reply More

Many years ago, when I first set out to be a writer, I took a fiction workshop with the late Carol Emshwiller, a writer of short stories. There were about six of us in the class. I had no idea how to write fiction at the time; I only knew I wanted to write it. The rest of the students, who did know a few things, suffered my weak little stories with grace and encouragement, and thank goodness they did because Carol couldn’t bear my writing, it made her positively livid.

So, she wasn’t the best teacher for me, but that was okay because she did do something helpful that I’ve never forgotten: she made me read a book on the art of acting. Acting? I thought. Why on earth? I couldn’t imagine how the art of acting had anything to do with the art of writing, though in fact, acting and writing have much in common when it comes to creating and writing characters. As an actor becomes the character they are playing, so must a writer inhabit the character they create. I have written both male and female characters, gay characters, juvenile characters, geriatric characters, single and married, rich and poor; if you are a writer with an ounce of empathy there is always a way into the heart and mind of a character different than yourself.

I adore my characters; they are my everything. Even when I’m not writing, maybe especially then, I am thinking about who they are, what they want, what they would like for dinner if I offered to cook it for them, what their dream job might be, what is their greatest fear. In yet another workshop (I’ve taken a lot of workshops), I was asked by the teacher what my character did for a living. There was no reason for that information to be in the story, it would have been a distraction, but you bet I knew what he did for a living: he was a not very successful realtor. The teacher asked that question to illustrate the point that a writer must know everything about their character, even if it doesn’t appear on the page. Not knowing what my guy did for a living would mean I didn’t really know him that well, but knowing that detail enabled me to more deeply create the character, who was hapless and a bit of a bumbler.

In my most recent book of stories, You Have Reached Your Destination, the youngest character is twelve and the oldest is ninety. I have been twelve, and I’m not yet ninety, yet the twelve-year-old was more difficult to inhabit because her history was shorter, she had little happening in her day-to-day life, she hadn’t lived long enough to have strong tastes or opinions—there wasn’t a lot to imagine. The ninety-year-old had lived a rich and complex life; I stepped easily into her character. But the ease or difficulty of becoming a character makes no difference in the depth of my care for them. I did inhabit that twelve-year-old, who turned out to be precocious yet vulnerable, able to process the events in her life with intelligence while being affected as a child would be, profoundly. The story is one of my favorites.

Recently, I wrote a novel in stories narrated by the same character throughout, a profane and eccentric fifty-year-old woman who drinks too much and is hilarious pretty much all the time. She has a very specific, take-no-prisoners kind of voice that had to be maintained through fifteen stories, or chapters, 190 pages, and keeping it consistent was a high wire act. Nearly every day for over a year I wrote this woman, I thought about her constantly, and when I sat down to write I was her.

I’ve never had such an intense relationship with a character; she has become part of my DNA. Ask me what she’s doing now, or thinks about this or that, and I will be able tell you without thinking twice. When I finished the book, and said goodbye to my character, I sat at my kitchen table and cried. Writer friends who’ve kindly read the manuscript have asked if there will be a sequel because they know how hard it’s been for me to give her up. Eventually a new character will come knocking at my brain, but I’m not ready for anyone else yet, I’m still in mourning for her.

If you don’t know your character as well as you know yourself, you can’t know what they’re doing or why they’re doing it or why they exist in the story at all. My stories are driven by my characters, so I must inhabit them completely, essentially acting without a stage.

—

Louise Marburg is the author of YOU HAVE REACHED YOUR DESTINATION (November 10, 2022; Eastover Press; winner of the Eastover Prize for Fiction), NO DIVING ALLOWED (2021; Regal House Publishing; winner of the W.S. Porter Prize for Story Collections) and THE TRUTH ABOUT ME: Stories (2017; WTAW Press; winner of the Independent Press book Awards Gold Medal and finalist for the Saroyan Prize). She studied design at the Kansas City Art Institute, is a graduate of New York University’s Gallatin Division, and holds an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Her stories have appeared in Narrative, Ploughshares, Story Magazine, The Hudson Review, The Southampton Review, Cimarron Review, The Chicago Quarterly Review and many other publications. A native of Baltimore, she lives in New York City with her husband, the artist Charles Marburg. You can visit her online at louisemarburg.com.

Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/LouiseMarburg

Find out more about Louise on her website: http://louisemarburg.com/

YOU HAVE REACHED YOUR DESTINATION

In You Have Reached Your Destination, Marburg captures turning points in the lives of twelve disparate women. Her crisp, clear-eyed prose, infused with dark humor, reveals the inevitable collapse of pretension beneath the struggles of loneliness, death, and the all too human need to be seen. From a pre-teen attempting to understand her father’s suicide to a ninety-year-old caught in shadows of past marital abuse, the women in this collection must confront the reality that change is the only certainty and that while life may not always bring what we want, it often shows us what we need. This collection, Marburg’s finest yet, invites us to face ourselves and our own life journeys with sympathy, humor, and courage.