Secrets and Contradictions
By DAVID CORBETT
Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
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I know a compelling character when I encounter her on the page. Her simplicity betrays an enigmatic complexity, and her known qualities suggest unknown ones. She possesses the one thing I want most from a character: the power to make me want to know more about her.
But how to create that power?
E. M. Forster, in his 1927 book “Aspects of the Novel,” presented the concept of “round” versus “flat” characters. He generally preferred the former to the latter except when the purpose was to arouse feelings of “humour” or “appropriateness,” maintaining that flat characters, comprised of a single idea or “factor,” could often be summed up in one sentence, such as Mrs. Micawber in “David Copperfield”: “I never will desert Mr. Micawber.” When a character possesses more than one factor, “we get the beginning of the curve towards the round.”
It’s a visual metaphor, suggesting perspective in painting or drawing, where geometry provides the technique. Yet how does one realistically translate a geometrical analogy to fiction?
It was through trying to answer that question, both in my own writing and in my attempts to assist my students, that I stumbled upon the curious force of secrets and contradictions.
In truth, Forster provided a hint or two, in his talk of “deeper” qualities, such as the deeper moral sense of Lady Bertram in “Mansfield Park,” and the capacity to be “surprising in a convincing way.” But there’s still a bit too much airiness in all that to provide a practical technique.
By giving a character something to hide — a secret — we create the illusion of depth: interior and exterior, seen and unseen.
If we believe someone is hiding something, we can’t help but pay more attention to him. Few drives are as strong as the one to find out — ask Pandora, or Psyche or Bluebeard’s wife.
Secrets need not necessarily be shameful, though many are, sometimes unreasonably. But they always speak to an aspect of what has happened to us that we can neither forget nor share — which, in fiction, creates tension between a character’s inner life and her dramatic interactions with others.
In Kate Atkinson’s novel “When Will There Be Good News?,” Joanna Hunter, whose mother, sister and baby brother were murdered when she was 6 years old, explains to a police officer why she tells no one about this: “People look at you differently when they know you’ve been involved in something terrible. It’s the thing about you that they find most interesting.”
What we choose to keep hidden, and why we do so, says a great deal about what we believe others expect from us, and about the limits of what we think we can reveal while still being loved and accepted. This again creates opportunities for scenes where those limits are tested — and either transcended or cruelly reinforced.
The mask we call the ego is crafted on the premise of concealing our fears, our weaknesses, our vulnerabilities — our secrets. And a great deal of modern drama is crafted on a similar premise, that of peeling away that mask, and the struggle to summon the courage, wisdom and honesty to deal with the consequences of being known more truly and completely.
It’s no small endeavor. We’ve fashioned our egos meticulously, if unconsciously, for we live in silent dread that our secrets, if exposed, will undermine or even destroy our standing among our friends and families, our community, our peers. That fear may be unreasonable, out of all proportion, but that’s far less important than that it exists — especially for writers.
The threat of being found out and therefore ostracized or abandoned is one of the key dreads of existence. In a sense, by harboring secrets we hope to defy the all-encompassing isolation of death, and keeping our secrets hidden is an aspect of the magical thinking we perpetuate as part of the ritual of life.
But though secrets may help us conjure the “curve towards the round” that depth requires, what of the capacity to convincingly surprise?
It turns out this is best accomplished by another trick in the bag: contradictions. Simply stated, a contradiction is something about a person that piques our interest because it betrays what we expect, given what else we know or observe about him.
Contradictions express a seeming paradox of human nature: that people do one thing and exactly the opposite; they’re this, but they’re also that.
We see the two polarities, the contrasting yin and yang of the behavior, and automatically wonder at the invisible domain that lies between.
But on a much simpler, more practical level, contradictions are also intrinsically interesting. Our perceptions are instinctively geared toward seeking out what doesn’t fit. This is evolutionarily adaptive: It alerts us to threats. That unexpected sound we hear could simply be the wind in the grass — or a predator approaching. Your normally placid neighbor’s bout of cursing could be nothing — or something you ignore at your peril. The underlying message of every contradiction is: Pay attention.
Some contradictions are physical, like the bully’s squeaky voice, the ballerina’s chubby knees. Some seemingly go no deeper than nicknames — the killer in Richard Price’s “Clockers” named Buddha Hat — or an otherwise staid and unassuming housewife’s suggestive and intimately placed tattoo, as in John Hawkes’s “Travesty.” And yet even these seemingly superficial curiosities raise a suspicion of unexpected complexity.
Some contradictions are based on our need to fulfill widely different social roles. In “Rameau’s Nephew,” Denis Diderot proposed that each of us is obliged to assume multiple personas to fulfill the seemingly endless number of obligations demanded of us.
We conduct ourselves appropriately in a variety of different social situations: the dinner table, the office, the chapel, the bedroom. We feel differing degrees of freedom to “be ourselves” in each of these environments, depending on who else is present, our relationship with them, our status. But most people effortlessly navigate such diverse circumstances daily. We are, each of us, masters of contradiction.
Each of the main characters in Charles Portis’s “True Grit” is intriguingly contradictory: Despite Mattie’s youth she is indomitable and savvy in business. LaBoeuf is courageous despite a foppish concern for appearance. Cogburn, the one-eyed drunken fat man, is relentless, cunning and, in the end, valiant.
The ultimate effect: We never know exactly which aspect of the personality will assert itself in any given situation. Contradiction
intrinsically creates suspense.
Both secrets and contradictions are useful in characterization because they automatically arouse our curiosity. But by hinting toward an interior within the exterior, by suggesting something concealed beneath what’s displayed, they also conjure that mysterious illusion known as depth.
And when elevated from description to drama, when allowed to trigger not just appearance but behavior, they offer as well the promise of convincing surprise.
David Corbett is the author of four novels, a story collection and a textbook on craft, “The Art of Character.”
Notes from Wissai:
I created a character named Omar, my alter ego, as somebody I wish to be. Actually, Omar is mostly based on me, the hidden, secretive self. A fiction writer mostly writes about himself: his deepest aspirations and problems.
(To be continued)
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