The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

It’s generally understood even by nascent storytellers that writing cliche or stereotyped characters is bad. Being able to recognize such weaknesses in the work of others is useful, but ultimately says little about how to construct complex, believable characters in one’s own stories.

For writers struggling to find their way, the dichotomous stereotype represents a logical step in adding dimension to a character, but it’s still premised on writing from types. Like multiplying an equation by zero, it doesn’t matter how complicated the rest of the formula is. The answer is always going to be zero.

Here’s Hills:

The second-generation Italian-American gangster has always been a nationality-group stereotype, the opposite of which is the warm-hearted boy who works hard, plays the violin and loves his mother’s spaghetti. Extremes — opposites — like this can be found within any grouping. Just put the mother’s picture in the gangster’s pocket and you think you’ve achieved some depth of characterization, but all you’ve got is flip-flop typing.

The impulse to go down this road is obvious. Writing from types saves time and makes everything blindingly (if not insultingly) obvious. Television excels at this kind of characterization, but movies and novels are not immune.

I’ve never enjoyed the Godfather movies or the Sopranos for exactly the reason Hills outlines above: I can never get away from the feeling that what I’m watching is a dichotomous stereotype rather than a convincing depiction of character. I also can’t shake the feeling that the world would be a better place if everyone just got thrown in jail or whacked. (Goodfellas is the only mob movie I’ve ever seen that worked for me.)  [ Read more ]

The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

The full title of this section is Type Characters, as against Stock Characters. It’s a continuation of the previous section, in which Hills makes a further distinction:

Let us say that a stock character is one we have grown too familiar with, through having seen him over and over in films and in novels and stories and on TV, always performing the same role or function in the plot.

Hills defines the stock character as a plot cliche, while the type character discussed in previous sections is a cliche of characterization. It’s a rather tidy analysis, and I think he’s right about the distinction.  [ Read more ]

The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

This is a short section in which Hills makes what at first might seem to be a peripheral point about characterization:

The average farm boy is far more like the average boy from Brooklyn than the “typical” farm boy is like the “typical” boy from Brooklyn.

Boys will boys the world around. And girls will be girls. Genetics and environment provide individualization — as do the life choices boys and girls make — but the commonalities remain. As discussed in the previous section, to write about a type of character is to ignore all commonalities and exaggerate any differences. (If such descriptions become culturally known they risk becoming stereotypes.)

The tendency to write about types — about exaggerated differences — clearly has resonance with drama. A story full of blandly average people is going to seem flat next to a story of radical, exaggerated types. If you’re writing farce or melodrama that might actually be a good thing, but if you’re writing drama, rendering characters as types will almost inevitably conflict with your goals.

Again, it seems to me that the correct response when writing from (or trying to avoid) types is to move toward the average character or the norm — particularly if you aspire to any sort of realism. Typical characters, because they are exceptions, are both exciting and exhausting. They attract attention but don’t hold up to scrutiny.

Whether a type is drawn from reality or from well-worn characterizations common to fiction, the author’s duty is always to make it their own, and make it integral to the work at hand. As Hills notes:

Types then — and this is especially true in writing — are used to distinguish or separate persons or characters, to emphasize differences, and not, as is commonly thought, used to lump them together with a lot of others.

Writers turn to types to create dramatic differences with a minimal amount of effort. It should be noted, however, that writing was never meant to be easy, and that individualizing characters from types should be the minimum you’re willing to do. The maximum would be ignoring types and categories of characters and presenting characters that are organic to your work.

Next up: Type Characters, as against Stock Characters.

— Mark Barrett

The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

Hills sets the tone in this section for a number of chapters to follow. Much of the section discusses the various ways in which people have tried to categorize personality types through the ages. It’s a temptation writers have always been susceptible to for obvious reasons. If you can grab a character off the rack, and nobody notices the difference, what’s the harm?

With one important caveat, Hills agrees:

…economy is necessary in creating characterization in a short story, and individualization from a type may be a substantial time-and-space saver over creation of a characterization from the ground up.

The obvious caveat is “individualization”, by which I take Hills to mean an author ought to do something to make each character unique. Types are two dimensional; characters ought to be three dimensional in some sense.  [ Read more ]