For an outsider, life is a lock to be picked. It’s human nature to want in, and gain the acceptance that will let us rest easy in our skins. Outsiders become keen observers of how the walls between them and others are built, and how gates allow or deny entry.
Our emotions speak of the numerous ways we can be left out. Were you a geek? Sickly? A product of family dysfunction? Perhaps you had the ‘wrong’ skin color or body type, or drew the short straw when it came to birth order (#13, anyone?). On the flip side, perhaps assumptions were made because of your beauty when all you ever wanted was to be taken seriously. Perhaps you were destined for the depths but were plopped into a wading pool.
It didn’t feel good, did it? Don’t repress these painful emotions—lend them to your characters. It makes for great story.
Let’s look at examples of authors who have used the outsider perspective to propel them to bestseller status.
KL Going
In an interview on her website, this young adult author says she had an idyllic childhood growing up on the Borden (of dairy fame) estate. She was not a Borden. Her family lived not in the mansion, but in a small apartment in half of the property’s converted dance hall. (Hmm, outsider?) Of her work, she says, “I draw extensively on how I remember feeling throughout school. I’ve always been small and thin, (4’11 and ¾”!) but I’ve spent a vast amount of my life feeling like the ‘fat kid’—namely, self-conscious.”
Let’s see how she tapped those feelings in the opening of her wildly successful first novel, Fat Kid Rules the World, a Michael Printz Honor Book that became an award-winning film:
I’m a sweating fat kid standing on the edge of the subway platform staring at the tracks. I’m seventeen years old, weigh 296 pounds, and I’m six-foot-one. I have a crew cut, yes a crew cut, sallow skin, and the kind of mouth that puckers when I breathe. I’m wearing a shirt that reads MIAMI BEACH—SPRING BREAK 1997, and huge, bland, tan pants—the only kind of pants I own. Eight pairs, all tan.
It’s Sunday afternoon and I’m standing just over the yellow line trying to decide if people would laugh if I jumped.
Amy Tan
This beloved American novelist was born to Chinese immigrant parents, and time and again Tan has dipped into the deep well of this perspective to drive her fiction and memoir. Here’s the opening to her novel A Hundred Secret Senses:
My sister Kwan believes she has yin eyes. She sees those who have died and now dwell in the World of Yin, ghosts who leave the mists just to visit her kitchen on Balboa Street in San Francisco.
“Libby-ah,” she’ll say to me. “Guess who I see yesterday, you guess.” And I don’t have to guess that she’s talking about someone dead.
Actually, Kwan is my half-sister, but I’m not supposed to mention that publicly. That would be an insult, as if she deserved only fifty percent of the love from our family. But just to set the genetic record straight, Kwan and I share a father, only that. She was born in China. My brothers, Kevin and Tommy, and I were born in San Francisco after my father, Jack Yee, immigrated here and married our mother, Louise Kenfield.
Mark Haddon
When someone can’t communicate with you in expected ways, you wonder what is going in in his head—and authors like Haddon have crawled inside that perspective to show us. His novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was published simultaneously in identical editions with separate covers, one for teens (after eighteen other titles) and one for adults (his first). It is a great study in show-don’t-tell: with no autism spectrum diagnosis uttered, we discover our narrator’s limitations and strengths from deep within the point of view of a Sherlock Holmes-obsessed teen who must prove his innocence when a neighborhood dog is killed. In numerous interviews Haddon has described himself as an atheist—in other words, he has rejected any pre-conceived worldview and is standing at the gate of life’s meaning, hoping to pick its lock on his own.
In the story, so is Christopher John Francis Boone. Haddon opens with Chapter 2 because of Boone’s predilection for prime numbers. Do you have any doubt that he will be a keen observer?
2. It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears’s house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead. There was a garden fork sticking out of the dog. The points of the fork must have gone all the way through the dog and into the ground because the fork had not fallen over. I decided the dog was probably killed with the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a garden fork into a dog after it had died for some other reason, like cancer, for example, or a road accident. But I could not be certain about this.
Great examples abound, and hopefully you will now see them everywhere. How can this help you?
Think about the ways you have felt like an outsider, because translating those emotions to your characters is a mad, marketable skill.
Don’t forget your secondary characters. In her new novel based on family trauma and secrets, No Place I’d Rather Be, Cathy Lamb handed off one of the novel’s key emotional moments to a secondary character with Asperger’s, Kyle Razolli, who has literally been taking notes on human behavior his entire life in the hopes of understanding it. While he is surrounded by family members with a supposed emotional advantage, Kyle is the keen observer who figures out what everyone truly needs to heal. The scene where he does so is profoundly moving.
Are you resting easy in your skin? Stop that! Stay in touch with the outsider mentality by trying something new that will give you a distinct disadvantage and record all. Your stories will be better for it.
Over to you! Share from your WIP: how is your protagonist an outsider, and what is s/he doing to try to get in? What stands in her/his way? If you care to tie that in to emotions you’ve experienced as an outsider in your own life story, feel free!
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About Kathryn Craft
Kathryn Craft (she/her) is the author of two novels from Sourcebooks, The Art of Falling and The Far End of Happy. A freelance developmental editor at Writing-Partner.com since 2006, Kathryn also teaches in Drexel University’s MFA program and runs a year-long, small-group mentorship program, Your Novel Year. Learn more on Kathryn's website.
Good morning, Kathryn. I woke up to your post, and it reminded me of a diversity training I attended, in which the trainer asked us to remember a time when we felt different. Powerful exercise.
I immediately remembered Thanksgiving dinners with our family and our cousins and their friends, which amounted to about 25 folks of various ages. They were great, and I enjoyed them. At the same time, I felt like someone from a different planet, because what interested me was of no interest to them.
I could talk football with the best of them, helped in the kitchen, and eventually became the photographer to give myself a role. It was also a great way to disengage and go take another picture. All the while, my interior life was teeming with emotion and energy, yet on the surface, no one could see it.
Until I read your post, I hadn’t realized that I used that sense of disengagement in my main character, though the circumstances are completely different for her. She appears to be deeply engaged in her life with a successful career, a close friend, a relationship. All the while, she has withheld herself on a deeper level, except from her friend, and even he doesn’t know her as well as he thinks she does. She would describe it as her capacity for love and connection being frozen at a certain moment in time.
Thanks for your post – great way to start the day!
Thanks Carol! I’m like you at Thanksgiving except I can’t talk football, LOL. I love this idea of literally placing yourself outside by getting behind the camera. Especially if what the camera saw and what you saw were different. A lot of emotions to pull from there! I’m playing with a similar sensibility in the baby stages of a new project, this withholding of self despite appearances. I like it—good luck!
Is fiction better when it is auto-biographical? Novels based closely on the author’s life can have a verisimilitude that brings them alive.
They can also be painful reading. The trick is not to wallow in childhood miseries, but to build from them a true character who is propelled on a journey, who must not just suffer but do things.
Genre stories would seem to solve that problem. In such stories, characters automatically have things to do. The risk is that a genre plot may easily move the enterprise along, reducing a character’s unique identity to a mere quirk or gimmick to brighten up the jacket copy.
What I’m saying is, while it is great to invest a protagonist with one’s own past and identity struggles, it’s also important to build a story–even one with a familiar plot pattern–so that it’s a story that’s personalized for that protagonist, that can only happen to that protagonist.
In other words, the fodder of oneself is not just for character construction, it’s a story engine too. Great post, Kathryn.
I agree, Don. I hope this post didn’t come across as saying we should write about ourselves! My greater point was to realize the benefits of anointing as protagonist someone who is on the “outside looking in” in some way, and that we all know what that feels like.
In a (very unscientific) quiz I give at junior high career weeks, “Could You Be Writer,” those who desire to write fiction have already had some experience of being an outsider. It’s a pretty powerful emotion to draw from.
On from the inside looking out? Doesn’t matter. Your point is terrific.
My protagonist is both multi-talented and ambitious. Neither of these traits are desirable for women at the beginning of the twentieth century. Raised by a passive mother and a morally rigid step-father in rural New York, she rebels against the dictates of tradition and runs away to an artist colony and shrewdly negotiates a deal with her employer to apprentice under two master painters. Each time a door slams in her face, she finds another. Her greatest fear is for her headstone to eventually read “Martha, wife of…” with no indication her life had any meaning beyond that.
(Interestingly enough, her REAL headstone is even worse, since the name on it isn’t even her own, but a nickname given to her by her husband. Oddly enough, all records indicate that she chose this, though “wife of” IS conspicuously absent.)
Her husband, too, is an outsider. Raised in a German-speaking town on the Ontario frontier, an artistic dreamer afflicted with a tubercular hip, Carl is the one wayward branch in his business-minded family tree and thwarts all efforts made to prune him into tidy submission. Having grown up an invalid and kept at home with the women, he believes wives should be equal partners with family duties split based not on gender but on who was best suited to the task.
Since my novel is based on the lives of my great-grandparents, my main characters had predetermined outsider stories. Oddly enough, their experiences have echoed down through the generations, making it easy for me to step into their shoes.
I, too, was raised mostly in a backwoods town where I had no hope of blending in. Creative aspirations were scoffed at, girls were discouraged from outshining the boys at school, etc. While I did have support and understanding from my parents (which was different from my protagonists) I always felt suffocated by the town and escaped as soon as I could. My mother’s family is morally rigid, and I’ve always felt judged by them. I thankfully did not grow up an invalid, but seeing out of only one eye does come with limitations and has forced me to observe the world with all my senses. Like Carl, I, too, hear the trees breathe.
Thanks for the great post, Kathryn. Yours are always among my favorites!
These characters sound great, Kim, and I’m sure the outsider status of your real grandparents is part of what made them so enigmatic for you, inspiring the novel. The ways you’ve had to adapt having vision in only one eye adds a personal element of “seeing things differently” that you can draw from to create them. Eager to read the results. And thank you for your kind words about my posts!
I love the example you gave of Christopher Boone and his so-called deficit really being his advantage. In order to understand human nature, he takes notes and therefore sees more than most ‘normal’ people ever do. My protagonist is far from normal, but being a teenager, wants to fit in, so her pain comes from the struggle between being accepted and being authentic. It’s a struggle I am familiar with. We all are to some extent. But I do re-visit my own angst in order to understand this character and, hopefully, breathe life into her. Awesome post!
“…her pain comes from the struggle between being accepted and being authentic.” I do think we all—especially we writers, who notice and analyze such things—are familiar with this. It is acute in our teens but it can quickly come up again when you walk into any room where you are the newbie. Thanks for sharing, Susan!
Hi Kathryn, Ever have one of those days when you’ve been in the flow for weeks, but find yourself momentarily adrift? Then you read something that renews your enthusiasm, sort of provides you with a paddle? Or maybe it’s just an energy boost. Well, you’ve provided just that for me today.
Being one of the few fantasy geeks here, I feel compelled to bring up Robin Hobb, and her character FitzChivalry Farseer. I’ve said before that Fitz is epic fantasy’s ultimate outsider—the bastard son of a king-in-waiting, who mysteriously dies (likely at the command of his step-mother, who has ambitions for her own son), Fitz is delivered, at age five, to the court of an aging grandfather who had no idea he existed. Fitz’s mother is from a mysterious neighboring kingdom, whose political motives are under suspicion. He must live among two uncles and his father’s dutiful wife, all who suspect his presence. Meanwhile, he has inherited his father’s strong capabilities with a magic that is largely misunderstood and feared, and in which he is untrained for its proper use. If he’s going to survive, he has to both hide his magic, and figure out how to use it.
As for my own best outsider, I have a warrior woman who’s been assigned to guard an heir, with whom she falls in love. She’s banished by her tribe when her guardianship ends and she opts to stay with her subject/soulmate. She follows him into a foreign war of conquest, has his child out of wedlock, and upon his victory he marries another (for political advantage). She hates being there, but still feels her destiny is entwined with his, and also can’t go home.
Great stuff today! Thanks for the paddle.
Aw, Vaughn, your first paragraph brought a tear! So glad something in this post played that role for you. (We just never know when something we do is going to play a role in someone else’s life, do we?) I love the example of FitzChivalry Farseer, and adore the name as well! So much to build a book on there. Sounds like a lot driving your novel as well.
When I get stuck—or even when I’m not necessarily stuck, but the story needs an extra infusion of energy—I turn to my secondary characters and ask what fresh perspective their outsider POV can provide. It always seems to work.
I so look forward to your posts, Kathryn, as they always benefit my work. I was an outsider in not having a father and living in a place (treed neighborhood peopled by families whose breadwinners were doctors and lawyers) that I dearly loved, despite understanding early on that there would be struggle in my future. There was also underlying disappointment and possibly suppressed anger–my father had been a dentist. His early death took away some privilege. Enter my mother. Amazing woman. And so these emotional tides that ran through my life, challenging me and making me an open-hearted person, have to find their way into my novels. They do and probably always will, depending on the story and the various iterations of the characters. Mining what we know and have experienced can always lift the work right off the page. Thanks.
Thank you for sharing some of your life story with us, Beth. When authors are asked how they became writers, they usually say an English teacher believed in them, or they loved to read, or something like that. I think the real reason,—and one that is far more interesting—is more like what you wrote here. Cut-and-paste for your next interview!
One key realization that I’ve gleaned from this is that every character, just like every real person, in an outsider. There’s always an individual isn’t part of, that they can only see as an outsider. All the ways you can categorize a person, all the characteristics that a well-developed character has–gender, size, strength, wealth, education, sensitivity, color, nationality, political beliefs, religion,wounds, whether they’ve fought in a war, whether they’ve killed, whether they’ve lost someone dear to them, and so on–all create a group that the character or person is in, and therefore always creates a group of outsiders. As Peter Gabriel sings, “How can we be in, if there is no outside?”
And being an outsider causes conflict. Misunderstandings. Opposed goals. Different motivations. Different interpretations. All grist for the writer’s mill.
Yes, Skip! Imagine the depth you create when you think about not only how a person looks, and how that might evoke their personality, but also how it makes them an outsider, and what conflict that creates. Now THAT’s a description worth including!
Great post. You mentioned earlier how feeling different/apart from others is good fodder for writers. So true. We are natural observers of the world around us. If I ever get stuck writing, I return to the basics–concrete observation–and find my way back into the story.
Having lived on three continents, I have a wealth of experience being apart, first as someone who stuttered, then as an immigrant (who continued to stutter), being a woman in a man’s field, choosing faith in a godless society, etc. etc. I draw upon these feelings and give them to my characters. That desire to belong is so primal, I suspect all my stories are really about finding home. LOL.
I think you’re smart, Vijaya. I mean look how much Mark Haddon conveys here through simple observation! Like Amy Tan, you have a deep well of inspiration to pull from. Go for it!
I draw on my experiences as a dyslexic in a novel I’ve written for YA readers. Through it, I hope to build bridges and increase awareness.
Awesome! An interesting-sounding perspective and a worthy goal. Good luck Leanne!