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If you are determined to have a work end with loss, failure, death, abandonment,
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Catharsis, the term made famous by Aristotle
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It can make you feel both exhausted and elated, as if you were emotionallys
Catharsis
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understand the inevitable sufferings of all humanity. And catharsis
be an intellectual moment that gives you a private
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recognition. Tragic endings can create a meaningful, beneficial, even exhilarating experience for an audience.
The question is how to make unhappy endings work. A classic strategy, asdinuRomeo
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the beginning that your audience is viewing a tragedy. Readers are
prepared from the start to focus on how
re
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plans go awry, the psychology of the characters,
and
the
fickleness
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fortune.
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Flaubert’s Madame
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At one time the “four-handkerchief” book
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popular. Audiences looked forward to a good cry. Right
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now, people seem to be made uncomfortable
like. The reasons for that are too complicated to talk about here. Perhaps in a secular society tragic endings are no longer seen
as meaningful, perhaps contemporary audiences feel overburdened by the enormous tragedies of late-twentieth-century life.
But as a writer you need to be aware that tragic endings are a problem. Your story has to transfigure the sadness you create so
readers feel catharsis (whatever it may be), and not depression (they already know what that is too well).
Catharsis ultimately is an aesthetic term. It means you did it right. Your readers don’t feel cheated or disappointed or
manipulated by the tragic end. You created a world in which the pattern was fulfilled by the darkness that brought it to a close.
See Endings, Poetic Justice, Resolution, Sentimentality.
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CHARACTER
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characters. As a writer you have only your words on the page. You
cannot
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writers often did. At the same time, there’s nothing
uimportant to your fiction than your characters.
oyou
thmore
cmust
So with only the words on the page, what
do to create character?
First you need to understand that your mind might visualize Bella came into the living room, but your readers know only
that an unknown entity, presumably female, whose name is Bella, has been put in a certain situation. There is a predisposition
to be interested in her because you have focused on her. Your readers await more information.
That information can come in many ways. You might tell your readers about Bella, as people tell about friends or
relatives whose lives and histories they know well:
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That information, as in real life, is selective and interpretive. After reading the description we are inclined to view Bella in a
certain way.
Or you could describe what Bella does upon entering the living room. If she starts cleaning up imaginary lint from the
sofa, one sort of person is suggested. If she spills her scotch and lets it sink into her skirt without seeming to care, that suggests
another. Something prosaic like sitting down and reading the newspaper does not tell readers much. But if she turns at once to
the medical column, that might tell us something. The actions you give your characters should be densely informative. If her
actions are rendered vividly, we know Bella without entering her mind in great depth.
A character is also directly created by what she says. Simply calling a character boring or witty doesn’t engage or
convince readers. They aren’t experiencing the character—they’re just being told about her. But if readers hear the character
speak, they can make up their own minds:
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Before we could drink, Bella insisted on explaining to us how champagne was made and how there are two
methods, one was better than the other, but she didn’t remember which, but that one involved rotating bottles and
the other had something to do with vats. “The man at the store said you could tell the difference on the label, but
he left before I figured out what part of the label it was. Brut— I think it means it was made by force. That
sounded like the cheap way, so I got the ones marked Sec which has to mean delicate, right? You’re not going to
get me to drink champagne that comes out of vats. But the guy told me there really wasn’t that much difference,
they both got up your nose the same way.”
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Let your character talk not simply for plot or exposition, but@
to create
theuperson for the reader. Then she starts to live. Talk
s
alone can create a character and a story.
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The most intimate way of knowing a character is through her mind, her ideas and memories, her fears and hopes. She
may speak little and do less, but her thoughts can give readers the feeling that they understand her:
Bella knew how she sounded, felt the words twisting away from her. There was some reason an old-fashioned way
of doing something was better than a cheap way even if hardly anyone could tell the difference, but she could feel
the idea getting confused and the panicky sense that not only had she gotten it wrong, but no one even cared if she
did. “Oh hell,” she said, “let’s drink up.”
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Thoughts lead us to feel strongly for characters, to worry over 2
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their inability to live up to their best selves. The more you let your readers
know,
the
they are likely to be interested in the
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tensions between thought and behavior.
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An absent character can also be a powerful figure in a story. She’d be created by the effects she’s had on others. The
other characters seem to be under her influence—their conversation keeps returning to her, and their mosaic of impressions
makes her present though she never appears. In novels, talk about a character is often used to pique our interest and to heighten
the arrival of the character. But with such an extended fanfare, the character had better live up to the advance publicity.
Physical description is useful in making your readers see the character, not merely to describe what the character looks
like in the ordinary sense of the information that appears on driver’s licenses, but in order to give the character corporeal life.
Flesh has heft, takes up space, feels through its skin. A fat thigh or a bony arm makes a person more vivid than height and eye
color. A spectacularly running nose is worth a paragraph of prosaic physical description.
Minor characters are extraordinarily important. Goofs, worms, and slugs are vividly remembered. Creeps, twerps, and
bruisers are filled with life. Neurasthenics and parvenus enrich the texture of narratives and become memorable figures in their
own right. Since they tend to appear briefly, they must be established strongly and clearly, and they must be invested with traits
that are both distinctive and recognizable.
Minor characters are often given a distinguishing feature, and every time they appear we are reminded of that
peculiarity. If the trait is simple, like a character who hiccups whenever he appears, or says “Whoops, golly me” in every
scene, the character is called flat. That isn’t necessarily a negative term. It means that the character is functioning more like a
prop than a person. If he has a few more features with some emotional resonance (maybe he’s a vivid whiner), the character
becomes round, or half-round perhaps. So a comic doorman who always drops luggage becomes a more developed figure if he
shows a picture of his family who admire him a great deal because of his smart uniform and important responsibilities. E. M.
Forster’s classic Aspects of the Novel (1927) talks about this dimensional declension of characters from flat to round.
What happens to main characters is intimately involved with the definition of the short story. Some people feel a short
story is a narrative that shows a change in a character. Without that change, the story is merely an incident or an anecdote.
Change usually means psychological change—realization, revelation, revision, epiphany, understanding, decision. Whether
that is the only way of defining a story is open to question, but it does remain the ultimate criterion for significant numbers of
writers, editors, critics, and ordinary readers.
See Anti-hero, Archetype, Facade, Flashback, Hero, Juggling, Motif, Names, Position, Stereotype, Suspense.
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