Stein on Writing (11 page)

Ultimately, the job of characterization among the best of writers is governed by that writer’s understanding of human nature. In the early twentieth century, a novel called
Pollyanna
by Eleanor Porter put a new word into our language. “Pollyanna” has come to stand for a blindly optimistic person. We speak of an ostrich attitude, putting one’s head into the sand, pretending what is out there and real does not exist. A writer cannot be a Pollyanna. He is in the business of writing what other people think but don’t say, which leads us to markers, the subject of the next chapter.

Markers: The Key to Swift Characterization

L
ionel Trilling, one of the influential critics of the mid-twentieth century who was also an infrequent but interesting writer of fiction, declared that fiction at its heart involved the differences between classes. While this observation is invaluable to writers of fiction, it is also a match tossed into flammable material. The fact that acute differences exist between social and cultural classes seems to be acknowledged in most of the world, but in the United States, where democracy is often confounded with egalitarianism, even the idea that social classes exist has long been taboo. It is, however, a writer’s specialty to deal with taboos, to speak the unspoken, to reveal, to uncover, to show in the interaction of people the difference between what we profess and how we act. Moreover, because touchy subjects arouse emotion, they are especially useful for the writer who knows that arousing the emotions of his audience is the test of his skill.

When we discuss cultural differences, we are not talking about economic differences or equal opportunity. Cultural differences arise from inherited characteristics, upbringing, and individual temperament. The best literary fiction often confronts these differences. Even transient or popular fiction can benefit from an awareness by the writer of this rich lode.

Wonderful stories can be crafted about people’s inherited characteristics, upbringing, and individual temperament. Characters, just like people, can strive to overcome this baggage and training. Some people succeed in doing so, some can’t, and the same is true of the characters available to our imaginations.

Many dramatic moments in theater and film come from clashes between characters based on differences in background. How can we overlook
the source of audience interest in Shaw’s
Pygmalion
or its rendering as a musical in
My Fair Lady?
Put the garish and tacky Eliza Doolittle in touch with Henry Higgins, and you have a clash of social and cultural differences instantly recognized by millions.

These differences are at the heart of what is in my judgment the best play by the best American playwright of the twentieth century, Tennessee Williams’s
A Streetcar Named Desire.
The play and film derive their power from the cultural conflict between Blanche DuBois, the fallen “lady,” and Stanley Kowalski, the blue-collar brute, who strip each other’s pretenses, witnessed by Stella, who married beneath her, and found herself in the world of card-playing, beer-swilling male animals.

Characters of different cultural classes caught in a crucible are, of course, ideal for fiction. The dramatic heat generated by cultural differences, inherited or nurtured, added to the differences of individual temperaments, can help writers create wonderful stories. These differences are a valuable resource for scenes as well as entire plots. It is the underlying basis of conflict in fiction.

Most people, regardless of their background, prefer others whom they think of as “their own kind.” Which means that there is a widespread prejudice against “the other kinds.” While this prejudice can be controlled and even overcome to some degree in life, a vestige of feeling about “otherness” remains even in most people who deny it. That feeling of “otherness” is useful to the writer in plotting because readers’ emotions can be quickly committed when they observe two characters of differing backgrounds in the same story.

It is useful for writers to step onto the thin ice of this subject matter with a clear understanding of terms and meanings.

A
culture
consists of the behavior patterns, beliefs, traditions, institutions, taste, and other characteristics of a community passed from one generation to another. The adjective “cultured” is usually used to connote a superior level of aesthetic and intellectual development that results from education and training.

A
class
is a stratum of society whose members share cultural and social characteristics. “Class” used by itself—as in “she had class”—connotes superior style or quality.

Good writers have come from every imaginable social class, and some stand ready to defend their turf. A writer has to squelch his emotional reactions consciously in order to get enough distance to use them in his work as a writer.

People in civil society usually try to overlook the kind of differences we have been talking about. But they don’t succeed. Their attempts to cover up noticed differences sometimes fail, hurting others. In general, cultural differences are noticed by almost everybody. When people learn to set aside cultural differences, we speak of them as “open-minded.” Yet “open-minded” people sometimes say inappropriate things to make people of other social classes feel “more at home.” This makes the others feel less comfortable, not more comfortable. Therefore, despite noble intentions, social and cultural differences can be a source of high feeling and high drama. As we shall see, for plotting purposes, differences are more important than similarities.

Action movies categorize people into good guys and bad guys. In many of the films that are nominated for Academy Awards, the discernment of differences becomes more subtle. That discernment becomes a necessity in the best literary and mainstream fiction.

The butting together of characters of differing backgrounds can be extreme, as in D. H. Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
It can produce comedy if a good old boy joins the ladies and gentlemen of Virginia on a fox hunt. What we expect of a good old boy is that while he, too, hunts for pleasure, it is in the company of men who hunt in packs, dressed in rough clothes, who would laugh at the gaudy dress of traditional fox hunters. Social and cultural differences strike sparks both for the writer and the reader.

In literary fiction, the clash of differences is often more subtle than in
My Fair Lady
or
A
Streetcar Named Desire.
One of my favorite stories, which won a place in
The Best Short Stories of 1991,
was Kate Braverman’s “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta.” Let’s look at the beginning of that remarkable story and observe the clash of background and values:

It was in the fifth month of her sobriety. It was after the hospital. It was after her divorce. It was autumn. She had even stopped smoking. She was wearing pink aerobic pants, a pink T-shirt with KAUAI written in lilac across the chest, and tennis shoes. She had just come from the gym. Her black hair was damp. She was wearing a pink sweatband around her forehead. She was walking across a parking lot bordering a city park in West Hollywood. She was carrying cookies for the AA meeting. She was in charge of bringing the food for the meeting. He fell into step with her. He was short, fat, pale. He had bad teeth. His hair was dirty. Later, she would
freeze this frame in her mind and study it. She would say he seemed frightened and defeated and trapped, cagey was the word she used to describe his eyes, how he measured and evaluated something in the air between them. The way he squinted through hazel eyes, it had nothing to do with the sunlight.

“I’m Lenny,” he said, extending his hand. “What’s your name?”

She told him. She was holding a bag with packages of cookies in it. After the meeting, she had an appointment with her psychiatrist, then a manicure. She kept walking.

“You a teacher? You look like a teacher,” he said.

“I’m a writer,” she told him. “I teach creative writing.”

“You look like a teacher,” Lenny said.

“I’m not just a teacher,” she told him. She was annoyed.

“Okay. You’re a writer. And you’re bad. You’re one of those bad girls from Beverly Hills. I’ve had my eye on you,” Lenny said.

She didn’t say anything. He was wearing blue jeans, a black leather jacket zipped to his throat, a long red wool scarf around his neck, and a Dodgers baseball cap. It was too hot a day for the leather jacket and scarf. She didn’t find that detail significant. It caught her attention, she touched it briefly and then let it go. She looked but did not see. They were standing on a curb. The meeting was in a community room across the boulevard. She wasn’t afraid yet.

“You do drugs? What do you do? Drink too much?” he asked.

The narrator and Lenny come from different worlds. We find out how different as the story goes on. Lenny is invading her world just as Henry Higgins invaded Eliza’s and Blanche DuBois invaded Stanley’s—with different intent, of course. The reader senses the difference early from the clothes they are wearing, from the woman’s fear and need to be polite, and Lenny’s impolite, aggressive questioning and assumptions.

The process of identifying different worlds for the reader can be accomplished quickly through
markers,
easily identified signals that to the majority of readers will reveal a character’s cultural and social background. Clothing, as we’ve seen, is a useful marker. A woman in a tailored suit suggests formality. Would we expect to see that woman walking in the street with a man wearing a totally sleeveless “muscle” shirt or a cap with a slogan on it? The reader assumes they are not together because they have the appurtenances of widely different backgrounds. But if they are walking arm in arm, what is the reader to think or feel?

Today, people of every background seem to wear jeans. But if a man wears designer jeans with a pressed crease do we assume he’s just come
off his job at a construction site? Suppose the reader sees someone on a construction site who is wearing designer jeans with a pressed crease, what does the reader think? He thinks
phony.
Phoniness can be useful to a writer.

While no marker is an absolute designation of background or class (there are exceptions to almost all of them), the reader will feel a reaction to the markers. For instance, if we are in a courtroom where a young man is being charged with a criminal offense, what do we expect to see? We expect that his lawyer will have made him get dressed up, often with a suit and tie. If in that courtroom that same young man is dressed in his usual cut-off blue jeans, dirty sneakers, and a T-shirt with an obscene slogan, what would we think? That his lawyer had neglected to do his job? What would the judge think? Surely the judge knows that lawyers dress up their clients. Will the judge think that the lawyer or client is showing contempt for the dignity of the court? The reaction to clothing is often a reaction to the surroundings in which the clothing is worn. Keep that in mind when you’re describing a character in a specific scene.

When in fiction, theater, and film the writer brings together people of differing social and cultural backgrounds, he needs to step back to watch the inherent drama of differences explode. Differences assume opposition. That’s what makes writing dramatic. If dealing with social and cultural differences makes the writer uneasy, that’s good. Emotion-inciting material is the most desirable kind. If social and cultural differences between characters excite emotion, the tension of any story will surely increase.

Many aspects of cultural class distinction have been used in fiction. Some characteristics that once denoted upper and lower classes have diffused in time.

In countries with diverse cultures like the United States, regional differences sometimes become more apparent than class distinctions. Generational differences also produce changes. For instance, while a conspicuous tattoo still suggests “lower class” to the reader, and the larger the tattoo the lower the class, in recent years some young people of all classes have had themselves tattooed with small objects such as a heart, a rose, or a butterfly.

Though the characteristics that once connoted “lower class” and “upper class” to readers are no longer absolutes, they still work as markers in which readers find connotations and associations. Those markers continue to be invaluable to the writer.

Let’s look at some common markers, some of which have been overused:

Hair worn in curlers under a head scarf in public usually connotes “lower class” to readers.

For a woman, fingernails the size of animal claws and garish nail polish used to make a statement about class. Clawlike fingernails and excessive rouge continue to suggest unsophisticated artifice, which can be useful to a writer. Black under the fingernails of a man dressed up to go out might be a marker of a person who does dirty work with his hands and never quite gets them clean. The writer doesn’t have to say what I’ve just said. All he has to show the reader are the fingernails; they are effective markers.

Public conduct with children is an immediate marker. A woman walking with a “dressed-up” child connotes one thing. A woman screaming at her children in the supermarket suggests another.

What does the incessant chewing of gum suggest about a character? What would an ankle bracelet convey to a reader about a character? What about a man wearing multiple large rings, or a diamond ring?

Mannerisms can be important markers. How does the reader react to a male character who publicly picks his nose, scratches under his arms and in his crotch? Would the reader instantly assume that the character is couth or uncouth?

Even the transportation used by a character can be a marker. If a reader knew nothing about a character except that he owned a pickup truck, a motorcycle, and a souped-up car with oversize tires and a noisy muffler, what would the reader think about that character’s background?

Food, drink, and the places they are consumed are markers. If the reader knows a character drinks popular brands of American beer, rye whiskey, and chilled red wine, what does the reader guess about the character’s background? If the character drinks Scotch, Perrier, and martinis straight up, does the reader have a different view? Of course. These markers are useful. Fizzy wine or coolers would not be the choice of people with educated palates. Nor would you be likely to find people with educated palates on line in a fast-food take-out joint. Conversely, a construction worker, even if dressed in his Sunday best, is likely to feel mighty uncomfortable in one of Manhattan’s posh East Side restaurants, where all the waiters are dressed in black tie and the menu is in French.