The Best Advice I Ever Recieved
-Todd James Pierce-

The best advice I ever received: Become the character and then write.

I heard this advice when I was 27 years old, during my first year at the University of California at Irvine's MFA program in fiction. Our teacher, Ethan Canin, flew in every Monday from San Francisco, taught the workshop then, just as abruptly, departed an hour or two after it was finished. Of course we all felt terribly cheated, that our teacher would only be on campus six or seven hours a week, but at the same time, we admired him. He was young, had gone to Iowa, had turned in the bare minimum to graduate, had then forsaken his writing, entered Harvard Med School, only to have his desire to write rekindled. At this time he was in his young thirties: he had published a novel and a book of short stories, both of which were exceptionally well received, and was finishing his third book, a collection called The Palace Thief. He is one of the few people I have met who writes intuitively; that is, he has a natural understanding of writing; whereas I need to understand the perimeters of writing, map out its territory, fence off its borders.

I had spent the previous summer starting a rough draft of a novel. It was writing about a family called the Daniels who were somewhat similar to members of my own family. By that, I mean it was a family who was going through divorce: the father became the lost father, the mother remained the center of the family, the two children began to look to their peers for guidance, the older one harboring a destructive resentment. I had amassed a little over 300 pages when, at the start of Winter term, Ethan pulled me aside and said something like this: "I just don't feel involved. There's too much distance between you and the characters. Stop writing about them. Become the character and then write."

I understood what he was saying, had even sensed it myself, but thought that readers might not notice, that I might somehow trick them into thinking the writing was more sophisticated than it was: simply put, I had placed myself in the wrong psychological space while writing. As the author, I was an observer of the story, not a participant. I occupied a space slightly outside my character; that is to say, I was looking at my character, seeing him from a small distance, when what I should've done the opposite: I should have occupied his internal space. Instead of looking at my character, I should've been inside my character looking out at his world, exchanging his eyes for my own. This, I know, is a subtle shift in placement, but an important one.

For the next two weeks, I thought about this. I printed out all of my pages and stacked them up on the corner of my desk. An impressive pile, I thought, flawed but impressive. Instead of writing, I read more books, took in matinees, telling myself that both these activities were writing related. I started jogging twice a day, three miles in the morning, three at night, which was twice my daily routine. I went to coffee houses and wandered aimlessly around campus. On weekends I visited old friends in Santa Barbara. Finally, after two weeks, I knew what I needed to do, I needed to accept Ethan's advice, I needed to throw out my 300 plus pages, I needed to go back to rethink my structure, then write from the start, not using any of my old work. Not even one sentence. Some of the plot ideas were wroth saving, but every sentence was contaminated with my previous narrative stance, one that was too far from the characters. My previous understanding of the story permeated every sentence and because of that, I could not use them. I needed to start over. In this I learned two important lessons: (1) that I needed to occupy my characters more fully and (2) a poorly conceived work cannot be revised into a good novel.

The proper place of revision, I've come to understand, is a type of polishing: adding or removing a scene, a section, a sentence; expanding dialogue; deleting overstated ideas. Revision is for a story that is, in most ways, working well already: good characters, good scenes, good narrative position, good tone, etc., etc.. If a story is flawed, however, often I can trace that flaw back to the beginning, to a misconception before I began writing. Like a miscolored thread, that flaw is woven through the entire story. At the time I'm writing this, I value beginnings. I will write the beginning to a story five, ten, fifteen times, looking for the right mix, an exact feel, because I know that the beginning will determine how the rest of the story will shape itself. To change metaphors, the flaw in a skyscraper's foundation will greatly effect the position of the 23rd floor, a problem that is evident through out the building, but perhaps only obvious in its upper storeys. What I mean to say is this: a beginning determines the rest of the story; a beginning actually causes later scenes to happen.

Michael Chabon was one of the primary reasons I decided to attend Irvine. He had graduated a couple years before I arrived, had published a novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, and also a short story collection, A Model World. I met him the summer before I began attending the MFA program, and sometime later-during a poker game I believe-he explained his concept of revision which was, I must say, in direct opposition to what I had learned up to that point: his method was a sophisticated version of the revise-as-you-go philosophy. Each night, he told me, he went back to the beginning, revised what needed to be revised and then, if he could, he continued. His work did not transform through multiple full drafts, but through careful use of the beginning and each advancing scene. If the beginning was good, he'd write a second scene; if the second scene was good, he'd write a third; if the story was going poorly, he'd retrace his steps, back to where the story was still good and continue again from that point; if the story was flawed, he'd start over, which was the case with his second novel, a novel that was never published, Fountain City-all 700 pages of it. Instead he wrote a different book, Wonder Boys, which ended up being a New York Times notable book of the year.

Earlier, in my advancement as a student, I'd been taught to write a draft, look it over, and then write another draft, hopefully improving the elements in the first. In ways, I still use a part of this method: through revision I can accentuate elements of theme, diction, dialogue, etc., etc., but I cannot revise the fundamental direction or shape of a story. Those elements are intimately tied to my initial draft; they are present in every sentence, every word choice; they colored how I described characters, events; they were, in a sense, the story itself.

Often when writing a story I reach a point where I can see the story I really want to write; that is, I understand a story from a new depth, a new angle. Of course I had believed I was writing the story I wanted to write, had hoped it would go well, but after a certain point (let's say scene three or eight, or even page 300) I will see how the story should lay (For example, I have too many elements, I need to remove the grandfather; I need to intensify the tension between the brothers; I need to structure the pattern information so that the later estrangement feels natural), and at this point, I should stop writing, open a new file, and begin over, holding that new story in my mind, letting it influence how I arrange my sentences, how I choose my words. Often, I will repeat this process five, six, seven times, until the beginning of the story is strong enough to carry me all the way through to the end, until the tension established in its conception is expansive enough to occupy an entire story, or novella, or even novel.

The most important pages are the first pages: they need to be tight, direct, knowledgeable; they need to know the story which follows. Ralph Ellison's first person narrator, in Invisible Man, begins his story by saying:

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids-and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

In this, our narrator establishes himself as a man who knows the story which follows, his confidence over the story's shape readily apparent, its direction aptly defined. Similarly, Humbert Humbert, of Lolita, also is able to define his story in those initial sentences:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to the tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

Here, we see narrators who are confident of their stories, who are able to conceive their form and content.

I cannot comment on Ellison's or Nabokov's craft, how they arrived at such confidence, but know if I am to reach a place of any confidence what-so-ever, I need to have that confidence as I enter the story: I do not need to know every piece of the plot, but I do need to know its main direction, and more importantly, I need to know the character. I need to be able to fit inside his skin, to think his thoughts, feel how emotion muscles its way through his heart. I need to have intimate knowledge so that, as Ethan Canin put it, I could become the character and then write.

Becoming the character, I've since learned, is a methodology adopted from Lee Strasberg's school of acting and, more specifically, from the technique of Affective Memory, which Strasberg learned from the director of the Moscow Art Theater, Constantin Stanislovski. At the time Strasberg was trying to find a teachable method of acting which was in reaction to the highly polished European schools of acting; that is, he wanted to find a method that reflected an American sensibility: he developed Affective Memory, a technique that was intended to develop ensemble theater, but instead focused attention on the individual character-actors, such as Marlon Brando, Glen Close, and James Dean. The line of Affective Memory intersects an American understanding of individuality and, by doing so, places emphasis on a single character, much the same way Twentieth Century American literature had done. By that, I mean that American writing influenced this school of acting, and afterwards this school of acting influenced American writing.

The technique of Affective Memory is a technique that can be applied to many of the fine arts, such as dance, acting, writing, sculpture, etc., and has been practiced by American authors, I imagine, before it was codified into a teachable system by Strasberg. At the heart of this system is the simple ideal, become the character, which is what Ethan Canin wanted me to do, to locate myself within the emotional space of my character and exit the space occupied by "the author.": become the character and then write.

To become the character, you must understand the character and his world. The traditional technique of Strasberg focuses on sensory detail, hoping by an accumulation of particularly information that the character's world will open up and the actor, or conversely the writer, will be able to inhabit this fictional world and become the character. The questions posed in such a session force the actor to consider the particulars of the character, force him to develop an emotional space for that character to inhabit: Last night, before this character went to bed, what was the last thing he was thinking; when he wakes up, what is the first thing he sees; what does it feel like to lie in that bed; where does light come from; it is warm or cold; what smells enter that room; what noises does he hear; for breakfast, as he sits with his wife, what is the one topic he does not want to discuss; if he could explain one failure central to his life to his children, what would it be? In this way, the questioning works from sensory details-a particularly description of the room, the house, his wardrobe-to the more important items of this character's life, what does he hide, what haunts him, what does he want, and so forth. Through this type of questioning, authors create full characters and once the characters are created they can be placed in meaningful situations, though that, I would like to say, should be the topic of a different essay.

The questions I find most valuable, of course, are those later questions, the ones that force the character to define himself, those questions focused on larger issues: what does this character want and why is he unable to get it; if this character is unsatisfied, what in his opinion is the cause for this dissatisfaction; what are the three things most important to this character and why might he be worried about losing them? Through this, I begin to force the direction of my inquiry beyond just character and, in doing so, begin to look for an important situation for this character to inhabit, one which will threaten him, or possibly promise something he wants. Usually, I answer the questions in writing, often in paragraph form:

My name is Steve Matthews. I live in Santa Barbara, California. I am 43 years old. This morning I wake up on the couch, a thin blanket doubled over me. The first thing I see, the white acoustic ceiling, water stained in the corner. The next, the VCR clock which flashes 12:00 repeatedly. I hear the sounds of morning, of traffic outside, of my neighbor's TV on the Today Show, of my wife's shower twisting on, the water swelling through overhead pipes. For breakfast, I will sit with her and our two children at our breakfast table, pretending that we can still be a family, though even our younger son, Jason, already suspects that that might not be so. The one thing I do not wish to talk about is the idea of love, though I love my wife, my kids, but am unsure if I will be able to hold onto it in the generous way marriage should allow. The one failure I'd like to explain to my kids, that I lost my own parents when I was young, that I missed them too much and did not know how to get over such as loss at that age-perhaps I still don't.

In this, I've tried to establish the beginnings of a character, the type of character I might be able to use in a story, though this character is not yet full enough to actually begin writing. After doing this short paragraph, I am starting to hear his voice, feel its tone-though it's only a start. More importantly, I am beginning to understand the shape of his life, how it might be developed into a story; that is, I'm beginning to understand its stresses, its weakness, its centered sense of need: the kids, the wife, the looming idea of the American lost father, the inability for this character, despite his age, to truly resolve issues of his own childhood, though he has ignored them for years. Finally, the questions, when answered honestly, force the character to adopt a voice of honesty-a voice that can be serious or humorous-but one which relates perceived truths that affect the character at a deep level.

Affective Memory is a technique, then, which follows a writer though the process of composition. Chabon's method of rereading is a good one: it forces him not only to clarify the story's beginning but also insures cohesion between the sections, and, more importantly, it allows him repeatedly to enter the emotional world of the character: once the story is begun, the rereading places Chabon firmly within the character's world, reminding him of its smells, its sounds, revealing the landscape of the world. The rereading grants Chabon access to that same deep level, where the character is full and honest, and helps him remain in such a place, so each subsequent section might be at the same depth, the same tone, and through this, becomes part of that original story.

The two most important things to remember are these: (1) that you must have intimate and well developed knowledge of the character before writing and (2) unless you are extremely skilled or lucky, you will need to rewrite your beginning more than once, insuring that it holds enough information, enough depth, so that the later sections are a natural extension of the writing held there. When Richard Ford was writing Independence Day, a novel that later won the Pulitzer Prize, he told me he spent over a year shaping the character and what he thought might be the events of the novel, before he sat down and began writing. Although most writers do not spent this much time in a pre-development stage, it does point out that the time spent before writing, developing character and voice, can be equally important as the time spent arranging sentences that might actually be part of that final draft. Do as much as you can be fore you start writing, and if (or when) you find you didn't know enough, go back and start over, letting that new knowledge reshape your understanding of your story. The second, third, fourth time through are easier and often more enjoyable. Once you become your character, you will know how to write his story.

copyright Todd James Pierce, 1999

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