Creating complex characters in short stories
Bring your stories to life
In this month’s paid subscriber craft post, we’re focusing on how you create characters that come to life in short stories by looking at Henry, the protagonist in Raymond Carver's "What Do You Do in San Francisco?", which is in his brilliant debut collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please.
Henry is a postman in a rural town in 1950s America who lives life by the rules, but his rigid life is disturbed by the arrival of a new family on his route. His opening line is:
"This is nothing to do with me."
This is then followed by lots of info about him and his marriage breakdown, his lack of contact with his kids, his job, his ideas about the world. And even though the narration does appear to centre on the story of the new family, it is in fact all about Henry and it's his beliefs and his morality, as well as his related backstory, that come shining through when he remembers the Marston family that lived on his route for a brief time one summer.
The couple in this new family are what Henry perceives to be "beatniks" as the wife paints, the husband has a beard and no job and the kids are pretty wild by Henry's standards. In short, they go against every way of life that Henry has ever put stock in and you know that he believes his feelings about the couple are completely justified by the troubles that ultimately befall them.
It's a sad story both in what happens to the family and in Henry's inability to think beyond his cultural conditioning and see them for who they really are, rather than what the media has portrayed them to be, which is what Henry has taken as fact.
It's a masterpiece of revealing character through action and in the telling of the Marston's story, Henry reveals so much about himself. How he projects his own sad circumstances onto the breakdown of the Marston's marriage, for me, really showed his narrow mindedness, his ego-centric outlook. Henry is a man who can only understand the world through the filter of himself — how he does things, what he thinks about things, what has happened to him — and he cannot remove himself from being the centre of situations even when they are ultimately nothing to do with him.
Throughout the story he's part spy, part judge, part lost soul, and he left me with very mixed feelings. I wanted to shake him for his emotional immaturity, his bigotry, his self-absorption and his behaviour that bordered on stalking of this family; and I wanted to hug him for his loneliness and loss, his inability to connect on a meaningful level with other people, for his confusion in a world that was changing too fast for him to keep up.
This complexity is what makes our characters come alive and something we should try and achieve with all the stories we write, even really short ones. How we convey that complexity has to be swift and succinct in flashes, can be expanded on in short stories, and can be explored in great depth in our novels. But for me, for a story to really resonate it should always be there. And for it to be there, we need to take the time to get to know characters no matter how short the story they appear in.
Writing Prompt
Create a new character that shares Henry's personality traits. Someone that can't put themselves in another person's shoes without always relating it back to their own experiences and beliefs. Then put them in a situation where they are confronted by someone, or something, that is the polar opposite of what they think is right.
Write the story of this person in this situation and just let it lead you. Don’t aim for a particular word count. Once you have a complete draft leave it to sit for at least a week or so then go back and read through. Highlight the sentences where you’ve conveyed the character’s complexity and make note of how you’ve done it. Is it through character in action? Through dialogue? Through inner monologue? Through telling? Ideally it should be a mix of them all. Unless you’re writing an experimental story that doesn’t deal in these elements!
Then think about what each of these moments is revealing about your character, and the story, and whether this is the right moment to reveal it. Play with structure to get the pace, tension and reveal that makes the story compelling and your character memorable.
Editing note: Often we see stories that have not really been edited much beyond first draft and it really shows. Editing is where you make the magic happen and just because you wrote something in a certain way at first draft, it doesn’t mean it has to stay like that!