Character Limitations
Character Limitations
Hi, friends.
Happy Short Story Month! Hope you are well. We’ve gotten a lot of new sign ups this last week, and I’m glad that you’re here. And yet, I let myself fret a little too much trying to come up with a good story for today. I wanted it to be *just* right. An impossible task. And yet…
Story.
Today’s story is Laura van den Berg’s Where We Must Be from her first collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us. A story I’ve taught for years but did not think it was online. But it is, and I’m glad I can share it with you.
Craft tidbits.
It’s a quiet story. Reflective, concerned with the passage of time and our moments of loneliness. On the socials yesterday someone had posted about how transitional their life feels at the moment. I feel this too. Maybe we all do as the seasons shift, as we look to see what the world looks like next. One the one hand, I welcome the contemplation of transitions and the way we can steer, ever so slowly, our lives in a new direction. On the other hand, it always seems to take longer than it should. We live in a culture that simultaneously wants us to live a life of self improvement and also one that demands results immediately so we can improve something else, I suppose. It occurred to me last night on rereading it that van den Berg’s story is quiet because the narrator is undergoing her own transition — one she did not intend to make. She’s left LA and her attempt at being an actress but can’t quite bring herself to go “home.”
I’m starting to realize I can’t stand to be anywhere, except stomping through the forest in my Bigfoot costume. That’s the reason I always wanted to be an actress: when I’m in character, everything real about my life blacks out.
There’s a loneliness to the job, to being a monster, to caring for Jimmy.
It’s not love. Or at least not what I thought love would feel like. It hurts to be near him and it hurts to be away.
The story is a meditation. It’s about sitting with yourself, now, without worrying about the future and finding forgiveness for past mistakes.
In one of my first writing classes, my teacher put this formula on the board:
character = wants ÷ limitations. I’ve carried that around for all these years. It’s a great way to think about who your character is. (And real life folks, for that matter.)
But here, in this story, Jean is defined mostly by what she is not. An actress. A convincing Bigfoot. A gardener. A wife. We know her limitations. But what exactly are her wants?
At the moment, she is a caretaker for Jimmy, who is mostly defined by the limits placed on him by his illness. Early on, she asks:
“What do you dream about?”
“Of a time when the world was nothing but water.”
And what does she dream of? We don’t know. She holds her cards too close, afraid perhaps of giving her dreams weight with words. But there is a comfort for her in being needed.
He lets me do what I know best: acquiesce, accommodate, allow my desires to melt like wax around the emergency of another life.
If you’ve been here a while, then you already know I’m a fan of the unsaid and there seems to be so much of this in the story. Van den Berg parcels out the information, revealing important details in layers, and often in summary.
There’s more to Jean’s relationship with her mother and sister than we know. I think, we are to assume that the quote above refers to Jean living in her sister’s shadow all these years, being fearful of her seizures. She keeps her present life a secret from them.
They know nothing about my Bigfoot costume, about Jimmy.
And yet, she wants so badly to explain herself, for her sister to accept her as she is. How else to explain the awkward 2 a.m. phone calls? Near the end of the story we learn that Jean’s been married before, another failure her sister, and presumably her mother, hold over her:
After we split, my sister asked me what I’d expected, marrying someone on a whim. I’d already decided to move to Los Angeles and joked that I did it so I’d be able to channel the pain into my acting. Only it turned out nobody wanted to see real suffering.
And so she is here, with Jimmy who needs her.
Van den Berg has a way with details - the Bigfoot mask, the rotting pears, the silt in the water. They add layers to the story, a way to show time passing. The way we want to make changes but don’t. The way we can only see what’s right before us. How maybe that’s a gift.
And by interweaving the Bigfoot story line, she’s able to add some lightness to the story to balance out Jimmy’s illness. She does this with dialogue too. Some of the lighter moments get direct dialogue (“He said you fell like a girl.”) while some of the heavier conversations are rendered in summary dialogue.
I misremembered the ending. I always think it ends with them out in the lake, floating. I thought it switched to the future tense. But no. It ends in the now. Of course it does. With them on the shore, cold. Jimmy shaking, the moonlight above. And Jean’s realization:
I’m being tested to see how long I can endure the suffering of another person.
Sparks.
We’ve seen enough ridiculous roadside attractions that the Bigfoot Recreation Park seems plausible. People spend their time and energy and money at the Corn Palace and Snake World. Write a story about one of these attractions. Who goes there? Who works there? What happens?
Or. “What do you dream about?” It’s a good way to get characters to reveal what they most want in the world. Start a conversation there. See what happens. It’s up to you to decide if they tell the truth or not.
Revision prompt: Have a piece that feels a little flat? One of the ways that you can speed up tension is by adding a ticking clock. Here that clock is Jimmy’s illness. It puts pressure on the relationship. Other ticking clocks can be storms or weather events, weddings and pregnancies, semesters, job loss. Let a deadline loom over your characters and see if that doesn’t create more outside tension.
Or. Take a dialogue inventory. How much of your dialogue is direct vs summary? I think we’ve been conditioned to believe every conversation needs to happen in scene, and this is a good reminder that’s not so.
Other tidbits.
If you want more short stories in your life, especially ones written by women, Susan Perabo is linking to a short story a day in May on her twitter account. She’s already posted some great ones.
Upcoming Submission calls: Sweet has a special call for Asian Solidarity pieces for the month of May; Pidgeonholes is open for flash through May 14; and Five Points closes on May 15th. Send them some of your lovelies.
That’s it, Scribblers. I hope you have a great writing week. I’ll be over here wrassling the novel. (Good gravy, these things are not easy to write.) I suspect that some of you might also be wrassling the long form. I think I’m going to devote June’s newsletters to novel craft. Right now I am thinking about Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, a book I read Before I was Writer. I remember it being so good and I’m interested to see how she creates tension and weaves in backstory. Though if you have other votes, drop them in the comments. My TBR is long and I’m pretty persuadable.
Pencil’s up, pages ready, until next time ~
Marsha