Seminar on Character – Denis Johnson, Dorothy Allison, & Ron Carlson

At the Tin House conference (please, please, please go next year – so worth every penny, although thankfully, I’m privileged to have received the Hawthorne scholarship that paid this unemployed gal’s room and board), I participated in many seminars, talks and round tables on everything from submitting to literary journals, learning the in and outs of the publishing biz once your book leaves your hands, and craft, craft and more craft. I took down a great deal of notes and will post as I go. What was most illuminating for me was how writers consistently contradicted themselves. Created rules and then tore them down, encouraged us to break all the rules.

On character, Denis Johnson says he starts with a blur, the oblique, his characters start with a grain, and his work is to consistently surprise himself. Dorothy Allison noted that “the longer I listen to people, the more I know”, characters aren’t formed, she says, until they start talking, until they start arguing on the page. “Characters grown from very small moments of curiosity,” Allison said. And it is crucial to pay attention to every crumb, every small moment. Ron Carlson recommended the waiting game – don’t force them on the page, see what happens. He also plays with his “180 degree rule” – playing the character against type, always having your characters surprise you – a farmer in overalls, we’ve seen that. What about the farmer with a Harvard hat and shovel…ah, well that’s a bit new, isn’t it? Everyone has to have an occupation, everyone has to have an agenda in Carlson’s stories. Johnson agrees on the waiting game and talks about actors and how they reveal character, how they create stories off the page about their characters and once they fully know their stories, can they be revealed. Johnson noted this when he started writing plays for an indie San Francisco fringe theatre – he would hand them his play and sit back to witness his actors inventing stories, character tics, movements, many times different or even richer than the author conceived.

Tools to Craft Character: Carlson says put the body in a scene, building your inventory to make the character credible, leap off the page. GO THROUGH EVERY SINGLE DOOR, he says. Open the fridge and you might see a hammer. Dorothy Allison says that characters sit around and do so much damn talking “why is everyone drunk in stories?” – make the characters do something, she says because characters only talk when they want to avoid talking. Allison talks about the accordion affect – writing a lot to boil down (I deploy this technique in my work, I vomit, vomit and then hack and hack) Denis Johnson gives his characters odd names and actions. Always starting with “the shadowy background where something can be emerged”.

Every word, they all agreed, in the creation of character, is sacred.

STAY TUNED: Notes from Aimee Bender’s seminar, “Plot This!”, complete with some nifty exercises to get you started & Charles D’Ambrosio’s talk on “Writing Dialogue: The Fundamentals of Speech in Fiction” (which was extraordinarily helpful).

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 16th, 2005 at 9:01 pm and is filed under the writing life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.