Incorporating characters in nonfiction
Every good story has characters, and that includes creative nonfiction. It’s easy for us to forget that when we’re writing first-person essays, like the personal essay and the upcoming memoir essay. But a first person-essay still needs characters—that is, people other than yourself who help bring your story to life.
First, let’s talk about why you need these characters. Yes, the story is mainly about you – your experiences, your thoughts and feelings. But if we only ever see you, it can get really boring and you can get too deep inside your own point of view. Without characters, first-person essays can end up feeling like there’s just one person moving through the world in a vacuum, and that can feel incomplete and unrealistic.
The most basic use of a character in a story is to show their relationship to the situation you’re writing about, whether it’s in a first-person essay or something more objective, like literary journalism.[unique_solution]
Characters can help balance your story, provide context, and make a story feel more energetic and alive. They help reinforce your broader points, and they provide a different voice for the story. Incorporating dialogue from these characters, which we’ll talk more about next week, can also help change the pacing of your story.
So who are these characters? In a first-person essay, they’re the people you interact with in your story – your parents, your siblings, your friends, your spouse or boyfriend/girlfriend, your boss, your co-workers. It may feel odd to think of those real, living, breathing people as “characters.” After all, it’s not like they’re playing a part, like in a sitcom, or made up, like in a novel.
But they are characters, in the sense that they need to be fully-formed and well-developed in their own right. In other words, they’re not just stick figures on a page who occupy space or exist as a backdrop for your story – we need to see them, just as we need to see you.
So – think about ways to bring their personality and appearance alive. What unique traits does your character have? What quirks? What passions? What interest? How do they speak? How to they stand? What mannerisms do they have? What flaws do they have? What positive qualities do they have? What do they look like? These basic idea can really help draw out a character and help them feel much more 3-D. Try to highlight a certain characteristic or mannerism; sometimes a simple idea can help us “see” a person more completely.
Now, this doesn’t mean you have to go in-depth with every single character, or address every quality. Some people might just appear briefly in the background of a scene or offer a line or two of dialogue. But when they do appear, you want to try to remember that they need to be fleshed out. Aim to make them as fully formed and vibrant as the people they are in real life.
Meanwhile, if you’re writing a first-person story, then you are also the character in this story. We’ve talked a little bit so far about the difference between a character and a narrator, and how a nonfiction writer has to be both when writing in first-person. What this means for your writing is that you have to make sure you are an actual physical being on the page. In something like memoir or a personal essay, it’s easy for us to exist only as the narrator – as the person telling the story, and that means that often the only part of ourselves that we see on the page are our thoughts and feelings, with maybe a little bit of action thrown in there. But true characterization means also showing ourselves on the page – showing our behaviors, our mannerisms, what we look like, what we’re doing, our own dialogue, etc. Look at the same qualities that I’m talking about portraying in another character – quirks, personality, language, etc – and try to make sure you are also portraying those in yourself.
A note about flaws: When developing characters in nonfiction—whether those characters our ourselves or other people—there’s a temptation to try to keep things positive, to varnish away the uglier or less flattering parts. I’m going to caution you to try not to do that. First, it will stifle your writing – any time you go into a project with the idea of censoring or glossing over any uncomfortable bits, the reader can feel it. Second, I’d point to some of the pieces we’ve read so far this semester where the writer didn’t hold back when it came to revealing some of those darker elements—like in Andre Dubus’ piece, or in Cheryl Strayed’s, or in Jeanette Walls’. Those moments where the author revealed him or herself – or those around them – as weak, selfish, ignorant, angry, etc are some of the most powerful moments we’ve seen in our reading so far. They’re the most human moments, and they’re a big part of what make the author credible and relatable. So – as with everything in nonfiction, try to tell (and show) the truth, even if the truth isn’t always as flattering as we’d like to be.