Writer Unboxed

Therese here. Today’s guest is author Paul Elwork, whose debut novel, The Girl Who Would Speak for the Dead, (Amy Einhorn Books/Penguin Group) recently released to critical acclaim. What’s the book about?

Emily Stewart is the girl who will claim to stand between the living and the dead. She and her brother Michael are thirteen-year-old twins, privileged, precocious, wandering aimlessly around their family’s Philadelphia estate during the quiet summer of 1925. One day Emily discovers an odd physical tic—she can secretly crack a joint in her ankle so the sound seems to burst from midair. In their garden tea house, Emily and Michael gather the neighborhood children to fool them with these “spirit knockings.” But soon this game of contacting the dead creeps into a world of adults still reeling from World War I. When the twins find themselves dabbling in the uncertain territory of human grief and family secrets, their game spins wildly out of control.

Said Publisher’s Weekly in their starred review of his novel:

Elwork paints an unforgettable portrait of individuals traumatized by death and unhinged by grief. The subtle and moving portrayal of people in the grip of powerful emotions that overwhelm rational thinking will haunt readers long after they put the book down.

Paul’s work has also appeared in a variety of journals, including Philadelphia Stories, Short Story America, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Word Riot. I’m happy he’s with us today to discuss the critical inner workings of our characters. Enjoy!

Emotional and Psychological Dynamics, the Shadowy Way to the End, and the Character Lab

I’m not the first writer to point to the emotional and psychological lives of characters as the key moving parts of fiction. I won’t be the last. Still, I’d like to talk a little about these dynamics here, as opposed to pure plot points, in the hope I have something useful to add. Recently, I talked with students at Arcadia University’s Creative Writing Institute about these matters, among other things, and hopefully some of it was useful to them as they move forward into this mysterious and somewhat crazy pursuit of writing fiction. I gave the students an exercise on character action springing from character psychology and identity, but I’ll come back to that a little further on.

I like a good plot as much as anybody, and I have no interest in divesting the concept of any possible literary value. (That sort of thing seems better suited for the strange borderland where some “literary” and “genre” writers take sides and bruise each other up.) The issue isn’t plot, as often pointed out before, but plot without much support of honest human complications—those vital moving parts I mentioned. Because plot alone is simply structure, skeletal. You can put some cardboard cutouts in, animate them to move from point A to B, and get them to fulfill a plot alone like a list of chores. Some of the chores may be exciting, some may be shocking, but it’s still just one damn thing after another, as John Gardner said about suspense without feeling.

I like the idea of starting off with the notion of a story arc in mind more than a formal plot of this happens, then that, then the other. I mean a story arc as a beginning and an ending, a place to land or roughly aim for—all subject to change in the meantime, of course. What lies between is largely mysterious in specific on the outset, a feeling of what I’m going for, because I don’t know quite what these people who never were on my pages are going to do. I made them up, patched them together from pieces of myself and lots of other people, but part of the reason I want to write about them is to discover the richness of who they are (or could be) by the only means possible—the writing process itself.

When we ‘re doing what we should as fiction writers, when we’re deep in the trance of writing, our characters should come to life before our eyes rather than at our direction, like uninspired actors. Recently, while working on my next novel, I got through almost an entire scene thinking a character was going to do one thing and not knowing she would do something different until typing right up to that moment and watching her act as if embellishing on my idea—to the vast improvement of the overall effect.

There’s no question, for me, that the really transcendent moments in fiction—the stuff that stops us and stills us as readers and writers—come largely if not entirely from this deep, trance-like place. As writers, these are times we’re as caught up in our own fictive dreams as we hope our readers will be; these are the times when the complicated and puzzling subconscious overruns the more careful mind that pays bills and looks at clocks and follows the Chicago Manual of Style. In the same spirit, I think the truly great character moments come from watching characters fully animated with emotional and psychological dynamics while deep in the trance.

At Arcadia, after banging this drum briefly (I hope) but vigorously, I asked the students to write down short descriptions of a character they were thinking of putting in a novel or one they were already writing about in a novel. I asked for the usual: Who are they? Where/when are they? What do they want? Then I had the students find a partner in class and share their descriptions so that together they could imagine what might happen if these two characters found themselves stranded on the side of the road together. I told them don’t worry about clashing times, places, realities—just put these two characters together and see what happens. There were doubtful looks in the crowd, and I wasn’t sure myself how it would all turn out. I suggested they think of it as a chemistry lab, a place to put things together and see what blows up, fizzles, and so on. I hoped to prove something about character emotion/psychology in guiding the action.

People got together, some still looking dubious. The energy of the conversations and laughter in the room quickly developed to a full roar, and it seemed from up front that if things were blowing up, it was more or less in a good way. When each pairing had a chance to share their characters and roadside meetings with the class, it was clear how well the students had used the time. The results were often funny and in some cases suggestive of farther horizons of story for these thrown-together characters: the invalid and the golf hustler; the businessman escaping his life and the student turned drifter; the neglectful, addict mother and the lovestruck ladybug prince.

Did I say somewhat crazy?

What was the biggest unexpected character action and/or transformation you’ve experienced while writing?

Thanks for a great post, Paul! Readers, you can learn more about Paul and his novel, The Girl Who Would Speak for the Dead, on his website and blog, and by following him on Twitter. Write on!

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