writing

I ain’t no Superman

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For my own pleasure and education, I write personal critiques of popular books, books I admire, and books I think would be better used to level a wobbly table. I record my thoughts on voice, style, and especially great passages. I also write down weaknesses and issues I find grating. Recently, while reading through a critique I’d written on a well-known crime writer’s novel, I came across this note I wrote to myself:

The lead character is a former Army Recon sniper, now a forensic expert despite a career spent only as a beat cop. He’s sexy, willing to sacrifice anything for a friend, a former friend, or a loved one without complaint. Children and animals like him. In short, he’s phony as a $3 bill.

Please…I want my heroes to be tough, sophisticated, and softies at heart. But when the protagonist can’t be beat at anything, is morally superior than everyone around him, has the answers and the experience to respond to any situation, the air goes out of the balloon.

Inner turmoil, self-doubts, shady pasts (that actually affect him or her…not token problems) are not contradictory to having a compelling lead character and, in fact—as story-tellers have known for several thousand years—actually the key to creating a powerful, memorable protagonist and a moving story.

The Flawed Protagonist is nothing new or groundbreaking. Where is Samson without his vanity? King Arthur without his bad judgment and wounded pride? Would we care as much about Philip Marlowe if he didn’t have a shaky set of ethics? Robert Parker’s Spenser stopped being interesting once he became bullet-proof and unquestioning. When his self-doubts vanished, so did our deeper interest…the later Spenser for Hire books are worth reading only to see what new crooks get their asses kicked by the Boston PI and Hawk.

Broken lives need a less-than-perfect protagonist. Anything else becomes a cartoon and at that point we’re just killing time until the hero is admitted into the Justice League. Subsequent novels become conflicts not with antagonists (because they aren’t true challenges to our hero), but with abstract elements, like time (defuse the bomb) or a natural crisis (a volcano!). And these are fine forces to array yourself against. But they aren’t interesting characters and they don’t allow the protagonist to mature or grow.

Keep your Superman. I’ll take a flawed Philip Marlowe any day.

Great Quotes: The power of language

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Concise, elegant descriptions are sometimes all we need to convey what’s necessary in a scene. Take this example from Walter Mosley’s, Devil in a Blue Dress:

Joppy was cleaning one area on his counter until it was spotless, except for the dirt that caked in the cracks. The dark cracks twisting through the light marble looked like a web of blood vessels in a newborn baby’s head.

It’s just two sentences. But do you have any doubt what that bar looks like? Will you forget it anytime soon? Does the spotless counter–but the  “dirt…caked in the cracks”–maybe imply something about Joppy or his character?

How about this description of a hulking mansion from someone known more for their action scenes:

It was a long drive up to the house. Gray ocean on three sides. The house was a big old pile. Maybe some sea captain’s place from way back when killing whales made people respectable fortunes. It was all stone, with intricate beadings and cornices and folds. All the north-facing surfaces were covered in gray lichen. The rest was spotted with green. It was three stories high. It had a dozen chimneys. The roofline was complex. There were gables all over the place with short gutters and dozens of fat iron pipes to drain the rainwater away. The front door was oak and was banded and studded with iron. The driveway widened into a carriage circle. I followed it around counterclockwise and stopped right in front of the door.

– Lee Child, Persuader

Notice how saying “The house was a big old pile” is like a summary statement, giving us the macro-view before following with particular, specific details like the lichen spotted with green and the “fat iron pipes”.

Child isn’t afraid to use repetition when it works for him: “It was three stories high. It had a dozen chimneys.” The two sentences together should be too short, too choppy, but they work precisely because they’re not made into one compound sentence. It’s also how you would see the house as you drove: short bursts of recognizable detail. This selective sentence length isn’t accidental: it helps break the rhythm of longer sentences to follow, like the longer “There were gables…” sentence. Other truncated sentences also work well: “Gray ocean on three sides”, and not the more obvious and plodding, “There was gray ocean…” Child even manages to sneak in Reacher’s sniff of disapproval with the line, “..when killing whales…”.

For an example of character description, how about the piercing observation of Pyle as seen by Fowler in The Quiet American:

I had seen him last September coming across the square towards the bar of the Continental: an unmistakably young and unused face flung at us like a dart. With his gangly legs and his crew-cut and his wide campus gaze he seemed incapable of harm.

Pyle, as a character and a person, is almost entirely summed up in a handful of words. And, of course, there’s the prophetic mistake Fowler makes in underestimating Pyle (foreshadowing and intimating that the presence of innocence and the ability to do harm have nothing to do with each other).

Language is beautiful, malleable, and—with enough practice—able to create entire worlds out of nothing but letters.