Do Your Characters Inhabit Their Space? by Martha Reed

Being an author is a gift that keeps on giving. When I first started writing I thought that someday I would fully master the craft and from that point forward writing novels would become easier, almost formulaic. As I begin to draft my new and seventh novel I can attest that I’ve learned something new, wholly different, and wildly surprising from the previous six books for my continuing creative writing education.

In my first novel I went to a lot of trouble describing my characters in extensive detail. I specified height, eye and hair color, general build, and any accoutrements like nose rings or RayBan aviator sunglasses they habitually wore. I wanted to make sure I gave the reader a complete overall character snapshot. But I’ve learned since then that readers don’t really need this level of character detail. They may not even want it.

“Books allow us certain freedoms – we are free to be mentally active when we read; we are full participants in the making (the imaging) of a narrative. … then maybe this is a crucial component of why we love written stories. … Sometimes we only want to see very little.” – Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read.

Showing a character’s reaction to an incident or even how they inhabit the space they’re in may be more telling than offering the reader a lot of physical details. Instead of authoritatively saying that my character is morbidly obese, I’ll describe a teak deck chair that alarmingly cracks when he sits on it. This not only plants the suggestion of a character’s visual description more viscerely it also compels the reader to become a willing co-creator to the tale as they engage their imagination.

I recently had an epiphany over constructing my new novel’s timeline. Because I was a total newbie, my first Nantucket Mystery, The Choking Game was a completely soup-to-nuts linear telling because that’s the way I’d been taught to write in Journalism classes: inciting incident, puzzling middle, and conclusive, wrapped up, and satisfying ending. The Nature of the Grave, my second book was much the same although it offered readers a deeper dive into family backstory. It was my third installment, No Rest for the Wicked where I boldly stepped into uncharted territory by creating two linked yet separated by the passage of time plots.

My next bold step may be using first-person and multiple POVs but I’m not quite there yet.

I raised another thought provoking idea when I rifled through my unfinished story archive while cleaning my desk. Some of these odd bits and bobs were so stale they listed my twenty-year-old Aspinwall PA street address with my contact information. And yet when I reviewed them some of these ideas were yes, seriously ahead of their time but still gold: human sex trafficking, distrust of authority, voter restrictions, and rampant political corruption. It’s almost like they needed to marinate or be incubated before they were ready to pop.

Now I’ve come to believe that creative stories aren’t meant to be static like a forced march. There will be creative energy ebbs and flows, and that’s okay. As long as I continue to show up, the tale that needs to be told will be. Stories patiently wait for their right moment, and the truth will out. They may never have been meant to be linear.

“William James describes the impossible attempt to introspectively examine our own consciousness as ‘trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks.’” – Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read.

How about your creative experience? As you travel the writerly path, what have you learned?