Dynamic Characters (15 page)

Sometimes, however, a character has much longer and more involved thoughts about some crucial subject (don't you?). These
will
stop the story dead, so you need to be sure you're gaining more than you're losing, which means that the thoughts expressed had better be pretty interesting to the reader in and of themselves. The catch here, of course, is the question: interesting to which reader?

P.D. James's editor, Rosemary Goad, has told the story of a long passage in which James's hero Adam Dalgliesh is viewing a stained-glass window and thinking about its details. Dalgliesh has strong attitudes about church architecture. Goad cut the passage from the novel, only to find it reproduced word for word in James's next book—and then in the next, and the next, until Goad finally let it stand. Dalgliesh finds stained glass fascinating; James finds his thoughts interesting; Goad did not. It came down to a judgment call, as will those passages in which
your
protagonist has lengthy ruminations on Japanese cuisine, golf technique or quilting. If you
do
decide to allow such extended sections of thoughts, the viewpoint had better be original, the prose sparkling and the details fresh.

Giving your character an attitude—or three, or five, or twenty— can be fun. It makes him that much more vivid in your own mind, which in turn makes him vivid on the page. And readers will respond.

However, as with dialogue, there is another half to this subject. You need to consider not only the content of your characters' thoughts, but the way they're expressed: the diction, sentence structure, even punctuation. All this in the next chapter.

SUMMARY: YOUR CHARACTERS' OPINIONS

• Your character should not be affectless; to be interesting, she should have attitudes about the events and objects in her world.

• Character's thoughts that are present in the story solely to characterize should usually be brief.

• Any long expressions of attitude should be worth stopping the story in order to air them. Are your character's editorial digressions original, quirky, thoughtful, important, well-written—in a word,
interesting?

• Character's thoughts that are there to drive plot should be clearly shown at the beginning of the story, so we can see what will change from the start of the story to its end.

• Character's thoughts that are there to validate plot at the end of the story should be expressed naturally by the character
(not
the author) in personal terms. This usually means that the character ruminates about what he has learned, what cost he paid to learn it, or both.

So now your protagonist is thinking, and your readers are privy to at least some of his thoughts. That makes everything about him much sharper and clearer.

Or does it?

Only if readers can tell clearly which
are
the character's thoughts, and which the opinions of the author. How to present characters' thoughts without confusion, especially in a third-person story, is a perennial hot topic in writing classes. Should the diction match the character's dialogue or the writer's narrative style? Do you need ''he thought'' every time somebody thinks about something? How else will the reader know whether the sentence is in the character's mind or is the author's statement? Do you put thoughts in quotation marks? In italics? In their own paragraph? Do you switch to first person for intimate thoughts? What about dialect in the privacy of a character's head?

It's enough to make a writer stick to first person forever. But you don't have to use first person in order to handle characters' thoughts smoothly. Certain techniques can help you get a grip on the more slippery third person. In fact, you can even strengthen characterization by paying attention to the mechanics, distance, diction and style of your characters' thoughts.

Let's first dispose of the simplest concern: format.

MECHANICS: I CAN COUNT ON YOU

Here are five different ways to present the same character thought in a third-person story written in the past tense:

John looked at the girl across the room.
She's beautiful,
he thought.
I want to meet her.
[Thoughts in present tense, first person, italicized, tagged with ''he thought'']

John looked at the girl across the room.
She's beautiful. I want to meet her.
[Thoughts in present tense, first person, italicized, untagged]

John looked at the girl across the room. She's beautiful, he thought. I want to meet her. [Thoughts in present tense, first person, not italicized, tagged]

John looked at the girl across the room. She was beautiful, he thought. He wanted to meet her. [Thoughts in past tense, third person, not italicized, tagged]

John looked at the girl across the room. She was beautiful. He wanted to meet her. [Thoughts in past tense, third person, not italicized, untagged]

Each of these is the choice of various writers. The only real rule is a reasonable consistency. Whatever presentation you choose for characters' thoughts, use it consistently so that your reader, once she's caught on, doesn't have to make mental adjustments for mechanics. That will only distract her from more important things.

For the same reason, don't use quotation marks, single or double, around characters' thoughts. The reader will see the opening quotes and assume that what follows is dialogue. If she then finds a ''he thought'' tacked onto the end, she'll have to adjust her mental picture:

This guy is not talking out loud after all. That's distracting. And the next time she encounters quotes, she won't know if the character is talking aloud or just ruminating.

Once consistency is out of the way, do the five formats for presenting thoughts offer different advantages and disadvantages? Yes.

Using italics (which are always indicated in manuscript by underlining—but you already knew that) means switching both tense (from past to present) and person (from third to first). Let's see this in a slightly longer passage:

Carla looked into John's face, which was bleary from four whiskey-and-waters before lunch. His pupils were unfocused. His smile—that smile she had once loved—looked equally unfocused, the foolish beaming of a man to whom all events are benevolent because no event is seen clearly. Dried egg crusted his beard.
I can't do this any more,
she thought.
It's impossible.

This technique works for short thoughts. However, for anything longer than a sentence, or if used often during a story, it can seem intrusive. The reader may feel that the writer can't make up his mind whether he's writing in third person or first. In addition, because italics are also used for emphasis, instance after instance of italicized thoughts may feel like artificial inflation. Characters who think emphatically all the time are just as tiresome as people who shout all the time.

A smoother way to combine first-person thoughts with third-person narrative is to drop the italics but keep the ''she thought'' and the present tense. Thus, the above passage becomes:

Carla looked into John's face, which was bleary from four whiskey-and-waters before lunch. His pupils were unfocused. His smile—that smile she had once loved—looked equally unfocused, the foolish beaming of a man to whom all events are benevolent because no event is seen clearly. Dried egg crusted his beard. I can't do this anymore, she thought. It's impossible.

If you're consistent about this, the reader will accept the sudden switch to first person—if the sections of first-person thought are fairly short.

But what if your character thinks a lot, and you have longer sections of thought to pass on to the reader? One option is to switch the thoughts from first person and present tense to third person and past tense, to match the past-tense narrative. Then the passage becomes:

Carla looked into John's face, which was bleary from four whiskey-and-waters before lunch. His pupils were unfocused. His smile—that smile she had once loved—looked equally unfocused, the foolish beaming of a man to whom all events are benevolent because no event is seen clearly. Dried egg crusted his beard. She couldn't do this anymore, she thought. It was impossible.

This is a more seamless, less intrusive way to handle thoughts, because you switch neither person nor tense. It's true that the third-person thought will feel slightly less immediate—more reported to us than directly overheard by us—but the difference will be slight. And the gain in readability should offset that.

Finally, you have one more option, which I think is the best because it's the most streamlined. Keep thoughts in third person and past tense but drop the ''she thought'' entirely, thus:

Carla looked into John's face, which was bleary from four whiskey-and-waters before lunch. His pupils were unfocused. His smile—that smile she had once loved—looked equally unfocused, the foolish beaming of a man to whom all events are benevolent because no event is seen clearly. Dried egg crusted his beard. She couldn't do this anymore. It was impossible.

But won't the reader wonder
who
thinks that Carla can't do this anymore: Carla herself, or the author? That depends on another important factor in handling thoughts: distance.

DISTANCE: UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL—OR NOT

The above technique will work when the third-person point of view (POV) is so close inside Carla's mind that the reader automatically assumes the last two sentences are Carla's thoughts. That happens when, throughout the whole story, everything we see and hear and experience has been through Carla's eyes, rather than reported to us from the outside by another pair of eyes (the author's). This is a crucial point, called
distance.

Distance is the measure of how far away you, the author, are standing from your character as you tell the story. Are you observing completely from the outside, as if you were a camera recording what your character does, and (like a news anchorman) occasionally commenting on it, as well? This is a far distance from the character. Are you standing right beside the character, so that you see (and tell us) the same things the character sees, with occasional forays into the inside of your character's head to give us his direct thoughts? This is a middle distance. Or do you spend the entire story standing inside your character's head, so that everything we see is filtered through your character's perceptions? This is close distance, often just as close as first person.

Distance affects many things in fiction, among them the choice of format for characters' thoughts.

When you the author spend most of your prose describing from the outside how a character is feeling, then the reader might very well experience some confusion over thoughts given without any ''she thought'' tag. Is this more description from the author, or is this the character's perceptions? Both a distant third-person POV and a close one can be effective, but which one you set up at the beginning of your story will influence our reactions to untagged thoughts.

This is easiest to see through example. Here are two subtly different versions of the same passage:

Amy walked home as fast as she could, her fingers numb with cold. She allowed herself a moment of self-pity, her usual failing. Other kids' parents often drove them places, she thought. Carol's mom, for instance, drove Carol to soccer practice every day. She wished her mother was like that.

Amy walked home as fast as she could, her fingers numb with cold.
Other
kids' parents drove them places. That stuck-up Carol, for instance—Carol's mom drove her to soccer practice every day. Why couldn't Amy have a mother like that? It wasn't fair.

What's different here? In the first, more distant passage, we observe Amy from the outside. We are
told
that she feels self-pity; we are
told
that this is her usual failing (no teenager views herself dispassionately enough to make this judgment); we are
told
what Amy wishes. Given all this viewing from the outside, the ''she thought'' at the end of the third sentence is probably necessary to make sure that we understand we aren't also being told this information by the author, but that instead it represents Amy's actual thoughts.