Characters through character

Last week, we looked at a couple of solo flights – characters brought to life only from their dialogue or only from their interior reflection.

But that’s not mostly how stories go. Mostly, we have a point of view character through whom we meet others. So what we get is character-through-character. The reader interprets the third party character from what the point-of-view character is reporting – but that interpretation always takes into account who’s telling the story.

That all sounds slightly academic, but it’s not really – it’s normal human. Suppose I find there is chocolate cake mess all over my kitchen, and some story about a dog jumping up and scoffing it. Well, fine – but my understanding of what’s happened will depend rather a lot on whether my wife is telling the story … or a very chocolatey 6-year-old.

So here’s a chunk of action – narrated by dear old Fiona – in which she interacts with a woman named Anna Quintrell.

The scene is set in a two-custody cell in a modern custody suite. Quintrell is an accountant who’d been busted for something bad. Fiona has been working undercover, but Quintrell doesn’t know that and still thinks Fiona was part of her gang. Fiona has a visible face injury which she acquired on purpose – she wanted to look the part. She’s asked that the custody cell be made as cold as possible.

Here’s the scene, a complete (but very short) chapter:

Quintrell is brought to the cell when the light is dying.

She looks rough. Not injured and knocked about, like me, but exhausted. Defeated. She’s still in her cutesy little summer dress, but someone has given her a grey fleece to wear over the top.

We stare at each other.

She sits on her bed. There are four blankets in the room and I’ve got them all.

‘What happened to you?’

‘Resisting arrest,’ I say. ‘Except some of it happened after arrest.’

She draws her legs up on the bed. ‘Can I have my blankets?’

I give her one.

‘And another?’

I tell her to fuck off. Say I’m cold.

‘So am I.’

I shrug. Not interested.

There’s a pause. A pause sealed off by steel doors and concrete walls.

‘They bugged my house. My phone. They’ve got everything.’

I shrug.

Light dies in the ceiling.

She tries to make herself comfortable. Twitches the fleece and blanket, trying to get warm. A losing game.

There’s a call button by the door which allows prisoners to ask for help from staff. She presses it, asks for more bedclothes. Someone laughs at her and tells her to go to sleep.

She stands by my bed and says plaintively. ‘You’ve got my blanket.’

I tell her again to fuck off. She’s bigger than me, but I’m scarier. She goes back to her bed.

The light fades some more. I try to sleep. The aspirin has worn off and my head hurts. Quintrell starts crying. Quiet sobs, that tumble into the blanket and are smothered. Down the corridor, we can hear more suspects being brought in and processed. Doors slam through the night: church bells calling the hour.

I sleep.

And that’s it. The scene is so simple that, in a way, there’s not much to say about it.

The central element here is the establishment of a power hierarchy. When they were both in the criminal gang, Quintrell was Fiona’s boss. She was taller, richer, more educated (she thought), more powerful. In here, though, that’s all inverted.

A cutsie summer dress is replaced by a grey fleece. The resources people fight over aren’t elegant homes (a contest where Quintrell won, but prison-issue blankets (a contest where Fiona wins 3-1.)

There are only two scraps of non-blanket related dialogue. The first is the bit about Fiona’s injury.

She tells Quintrell she was hurt once ‘resisting arrest’ – that is, she claims she fought the police who tried to arrest her. And part of the injury was after arrest, meaning that she was beaten up during interrogation. That’s not true – Fiona and the reader know it’s not true – but

1. It makes Quintrell even more scared about her situation and
2. It makes Fiona look even scarier to Quintrell, because she gets beaten up by cops and doesn’t even seem that perturbed by it.

The other non-blanket related moment is Quintrell saying, ‘They bugged my house. My phone. They’ve got everything.’

That’s Quintrell looking at total defeat – a prison sentence stretching ahead of her. But it’s also a frightened woman reaching out to someone who might be a friend. It’s a request for sympathy.

That request gets yet another shrug. So far Quintrell has received from Fiona:

1. A stare
2. A blanket
3. A ‘fuck off’
4. Two shrugs.

That’s not really much of a basis for friendship, so Quintrell who is imprisoned and cold and facing jail is now also friendless.

Nothing at all has happened in this scene, except that: ‘Quintrell starts crying. Quiet sobs, that tumble into the blanket and are smothered.’

 That moment of crying is the bit Fiona has been working to achieve. In the morning, when they wake, Fiona shows a tiny bit of openness to friendship. Here’s a tiny snippet from the chapter that follows:

Quintrell trusts my legend [=undercover identity] completely now. Perhaps she did before, I don’t know, but my injuries and my presence here have washed away any last trace of suspicion.

I cover up with blankets again. Then relent and throw one over to Quintrell.

‘Thanks.’

She pulls the blanket over her shoulders and arranges it over her front. She looks like a disaster relief victim, or would do if disaster relief victims wore pretty little summer dresses with matching loafers.

‘I like your dress.’

‘Thanks.’

Silence fills the cell.

Fiona gives Quintrell a blanket and says something nice about her dress. That’s the nudge that Quintrell needs to turn all confessional. She starts spilling her heart out to Fiona … unaware that the whole thing is being recorded. She ends up incriminating herself and most of her fellow gang-members.

And throughout all this, we always learn more about Quintrell, but always through a Fiona-ish lens. A Jack Reacher type character might have noted the dress – roughly: “she wore a blue and white summer dress” – but wouldn’t have got involved with it.

A more feminine type character might have started to characterise the dress a bit more. (“A summer dress, but smart, almost nautical. A dress that wanted to hold a glass of cold white wine overlooking some sunny beachfront in the Hamptons.”)

Fiona is feminine enough to circle back to Quintrell’s clothes, but in a Fiona-ish way – ‘if disaster relief victims wore pretty little summer dresses …’

So every time we learn something about Quintrell, we also learn something about Fiona. And in fact, because Fiona’s undercover, we understand Fiona herself at two levels: the Fiona she’s pretending to be, and the Fiona she really is.

Last week, I said that our two masters of fiction worked via (i) putting some real unpredictability into their characters and (ii) letting us, the reader, figure out what’s going on.

The scene we’ve looked at today involves two people not one, so the focus is always shared.

But the same basic rule applies.

Keep the scene unpredictable. Here, the scene gets its tension in part because we know that Fiona isn’t actually a horrible cow. She’s someone who normally would share her blankets or comfort a woman in distress. So we keep sort of expecting her to do just that. But she doesn’t. She keeps the blankets and tells woman-in-distress to fuck off.

Fiona’s a joy to write in part because she brings her own built-in unpredictability. You have to pay close attention to the scene, because (this is Fiona) you just aren’t sure what’ happening next.

And: don’t explain.

There’s basically no explanation for the reader at all in the parts I’ve just quoted. A little further on, though, we get this:

I say, ‘Anna, how did you get into all this? Why did you get started?’

And she tells me.

Almost without further prompting. Without thought for where she is or who could be listening. It’s a beautiful illustration of the interrogator’s oldest maxim: that people want to confess. An urge as deep as breathing. The beautiful relief of sharing secrets.

That last paragraph is the first time that Fiona explains anything to the reader. But (and I think this is a pretty good rule in fiction) that the explanation is only given, once the reader already (kind of) knows it. (If you’re explaining how custody suites work or rules around covert recording, that’s different. I’m talking here about character/emotional type explanations.)

In effect, what Fiona is doing here is simply voicing something that the reader has already figured out.

So the reader brain is doing something like this: “Wow, Fiona is being a real cow. And blimey, Quintrell looks defeated. Oh, she’s crying now. And what’s this? Fiona’s being a little bit nice this morning. Bet Quintrell needs that. And – aha! – Fiona’s now basically inviting Quintrell to confess to everything. She really shouldn’t do that, but I can see she’s absolutely going to.”

All that Fiona is doing with her ‘urge to confess’ paragraph is wrapping that already-existing understanding up into a nice little package, so the reader-brain can dock that bit of knowledge and move on.

Always with these emails, I learn what I think by writing the email.

So, honestly, I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to find today, but I think this last lesson is the big one. It’s OK to explain something character-related to the reader … but you need to only do that once the reader already basically knows. You’re drawing a line under something so you can move on, but the reader needs to have done the work for themselves first.

Here endeth the lesson.

And if you find yourself in a cell with Fiona, then keep your mouth shut – and your blankets close.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Explanations

Interesting one today. I want you to find a place in your text where you explain something about character X. Does the reader already kind of know what you’re saying, or not? Why is the explanation here. Find a 300 word chunk and tell us your thoughts.

When you’re ready, log into Townhouse and share your extract here.

Til soon.

Harry