This week, we’re returning to our series on the common reasons why we reject stories, and what we are looking for instead. This week’s focus is on how we value characters and plots when we read submissions.
There are those writers who put plot above everything else, planning out the events of the narrative, setting out plot beats as if there were cruise line excursion itineraries. There are others who’ll tell you that a story lives or dies on its structure as if a reader will find themselves falling off a narrative’s faulty construction and plummet to their deaths (which in the mind of the writer really equates to them putting the story down and never thinking about it again). That is not to say that those craft elements aren’t important. They have real value to the function of a narrative but they, at least to me, act as supports for the ultimate aspect of a story on which everything rests.
Character
Characters are the heart of the narrative circulatory system;the adventures ashore the excursion, the parachute that saves the reader from a crumbling structure. More than anything when I’m reading a story, it’s the characters that determine whether I’ll continue to the next page. So often I see stories where the characters seem as though they’re secondary to the events of the story. They’re the types of characters who seem to exist solely for the resolution for the plot, they move about in concentrated steps without any sense of life beyond that of the plot itself. These stories can have tight plots and an excellent structure behind them, but without the creation of compelling characters it makes a story nothing more than fast food, filling but unremarkable.
When I’m talking about a sense of life, what I mean is creating a character with some sense of history, of a life that exists beyond the margins of the page. The stories that stick with me are those that have characters who have histories and give me the sense that they exist in a wider world. There is in a sense, a hidden history, a hidden past that forms these characters, and the most masterful writers manifest those aspects of a character’s life and from there one can see those things that a character lacks, desires, detest and ultimately craves.
These things do not have to be solely related to the plot either, they can be things which exist on the margins but nonetheless have an effect on the character. I enjoy reading those little things that form a little portrait of a character, knowing the poetry they read, the food they eat and how. I’m unashamed to say that I’m a fan of digressions in stories, those literary side avenues where the smallest things exist but nonetheless form the identity of the character and show those parts of themselves that other characters will never know. People are like this too, most of us may never know those little things about the people that occupy our daily lives, even those most close to us. Literature presents that opportunity to see those things about a person, that is to say to see the context of their lives.
A character that sticks with me in this regard is Juan García Madero from Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. García Madero, a law student turned literary adventurer, is a supremely interesting character; not only his boundless curiosity and knowledge of poetry are interesting points of his character. As these traits clash with his aunt and uncle’s desire for him to live a modest, normal life and join the white collar middle class lifestyle that was on the rise. What García Madero wants is different: he wants to live the life of a poet, to understand art and find belonging with the visceral realist who represents that poetic lifestyle that García Madero dreams of. It is from that desire that Garíca Madero starts to become complex, interesting and ultimately worth following because those desires have wider meanings with the world that he inhabits and speaks to the context in which he lives.
How then do we create characters that are as complex as García Madero? I think it begins with figuring out not only what it is a character desires but what those desires make them do. From there we as writers can move the story forward and start to investigate the source of those desires, the triggers and points of stoppage. In doing these investigations it opens up characters to the wider world that they inhabit and makes them not only acted on by the world but they become active in it no longer mere pawns to plot or structure but a person worth following and reading about. I want to read about characters who have that sense of history to them, and are marked by desire for something more than their past can offer them. There’s value in that creation of a past, in the minutiae of everyday pleasures, pains and frustrations. Showing those things is what illuminates a character and it is my hope to see more characters whose existence can stretch out beyond the margins of the page.
This post is part of our series coaching writers, especially new writers who are unfamiliar with the litmag submission process, on how to present yourselves and your stories so that you are competitive for publication. Keep reading as we review more of the common problems that lead us to reject submissions. Our goal is to help you improve not only the quality of your writing but also your understanding of the editorial process.
Dominique 
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